Specialty coffee roaster with cafés in Brera, Milan

Cafezal

A Consultant Quits and Buys a Roaster

3.5 of 5

Carlos Bitencourt is a Brazilian engineer who worked as a management consultant in Britain and Germany and then walked away to roast coffee in Milan. I spent long enough in that trade to recognise the escape plan. Most of us talk about it over airport whisky. He actually did it. Cafezal means coffee plantation in Portuguese, and the name is the mission statement.

They started roasting in 2017 and opened the first shop on Via Solferino in Brera in 2018, and Cafezal says it was the first specialty coffee roastery in the city. The Solferino room is built for both kinds of Milanese: the one who knocks back an espresso standing up and the one who sits with a notebook for an hour. In 2022 came the Coffee Hub on Viale Premuda, a big space with the roastery, a kitchen, an academy for baristas and home brewers, coworking and brunch. There is a small 1920s-style shop on Corso Magenta and a bakery and pastry lab at Porta Venezia, and more counters since.

The coffee is the point and the Brazilian roots show in it. Order a filter and ask about the farms. If you want the full show, go to Premuda on a weekend and watch them roast while you eat. If you only have ten minutes, Solferino will do the job properly.

Order this

An espresso of their house roast, A filter of a single-farm Brazilian coffee, Whatever comes out of their own pastry lab, Brunch at the Coffee Hub

The damage

$$

Go

Mid-morning at Solferino, or a slow weekend brunch at the Viale Premuda hub

Find it

Via Solferino 27, 20121 Milano MI, Italy

Website

cafezal.it