Go to Danish Coffee Festival if you’re curious about coffee craft, machines, and the little microcosm of modern coffee culture — and want to be inspired. Stay home if you mainly drink coffee out of habit and prefer a good cup without having to explain it in haiku, and you don’t have a strong opinion about chestnut nougat notes.
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Disclaimer: Apropos Magazine received access or a review copy. As always, we share our own impressions — unfiltered.
Six stars
Danish Coffee Festival. Right at the entrance, the rules become clear: expect most of the people you’ll be ordering coffee from to speak English. Not because they can’t speak Danish, but because that’s how niche cultures signal seriousness.
The large hall at TAP 1 was packed with exhibitors. Machines, water filtration, grinders, beans — and flavours ranging from mango to something suspiciously like superglue. It was all varied, technically impressive, and clearly made for people who take coffee very seriously. We were there to be inspired.
That happened, partly.
Several stalls were hard to get in touch with. In some places, we were outright ignored. A common consensus seemed to be that coffee hipsters are too cool to say hello — and mildly irritated if you can’t define the undertones in your coffee yourself, but just say cortado. Much of the experience felt more trade-fair than festival-like, and a large part of the event seemed aimed at restaurateurs rather than ordinary visitors.
The best treatment by far came at one stall, where we made it explicit: we’re kitchen-table coffee drinkers. No storytelling. No English. Just coffee. And they only sold machines for cafés.
When you finally did get someone’s attention, much of the serving consisted of pour-overs that were already cold and poured in symbolic amounts. It felt strange. As if the ritual mattered more than the result. The startup pitch was always lurking just beneath the surface:
“One morning I was standing there drinking boiling water and thought: why can’t I put bitter beans in it that give me energy and help me go to the toilet? And that was the starting gun for coffeelovemachine.dk.”
There was also a stall making tea in an espresso machine. “If you don’t have time to make your tea.” Life is short, admittedly, but I’ve never felt impatient while my bedtime infusion was steeping.
The festival also offered workshops — if you went looking — and a barista competition. It was wrapped in a nostalgic tale of coffee beans, built like a classic hero’s journey: the metaphorical Mount Everest had to be climbed before the participant could stand with a microphone and deliver their story to a panel of coffee judges I had no idea were. Along the way, the machines were tapped on unnecessarily while the story was being delivered. I didn’t quite catch it.
In the end, we did manage to get both cortado and americano. There was also kombucha and carrot cake tea. In other words: solutions existed. But the target audience for the event was never entirely clear. Full respect to people who take their coffee game seriously — but the experience economy around a Colombian bean that has passed through five middlemen and ended up with a man in braces who has written a haiku on green-grey packaging does not make me want to pay an astronomical sum.
Not when other comparable products are standing side by side. And certainly not when, to be honest, I’d probably rather just have Irma’s blue coffee instead.
