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We picked Finnland as a travel destination in an attempt to escape the approaching summer heat and expecting it to offer lower temperatures then Munich but were welcomed with clear blue sky and 25 degrees in the shade. Oh well, could be worse. Apart from exploring the tranquil finnish nature with all its lakes, forests and nordic beaches, checking out the Helsinki specialty coffee scene was as usual on my travel goals checklist. Here is a list of coffee shops I’ve managed to visit, I’ll deep dive into my experiences with them right after:

Rams Roasters was our first destination when we arrived to Helsinki and managed to park our car at an overpriced parking lot. I was a little bit disappointed to find out they didn’t have self roasted coffee, barista explained they only roast house espresso blend sometimes. I would drop ‘roasters’ from the name then too, since it is a little bit confusing. They had a number of roasters I know already on the offer, so I had a Columbian Washed filter from Koppi, which I enjoyed very much. They did seem to have a great baked goods and pastries selection though, so definitely worth a visit.

Strolling through the city on another day and looking for an afternoon caffeine boost we stopped by Andante Specialty Coffee. They had scones, served with some cream cheese and strawberry jam, which I haven’t seen in many coffee shops outside UK. I was a bit dissapointed not to find any single local roaster among the coffee selection again. Also, I noticed many french roasters represented in the coffee shops of Helsinki like e.g. KAWA, which I haven’t seen much in Munich.

One of the most memorable coffee shops was definitely Outrun Cafe. Located in the extravagant district of East Pasila, this retrofuturist cafe certainly stands out. Check out the way there from the main road:

Funny enough I saw a very similar timelapse video in The Finnish Museum of Photography at the permanent exhibition downstairs a couple of days after I shot it. The Cafe has a very thought through and cool interior, the sweets selection looks very extravagant too.

They had a lot of cool books and zines to browse through. One that I found especially interesting was “i would like your fruitiest funkiest most fermented canephora on the menu” by Mikolaj Pociecha. He got very much into canephora coffee and is trying to make it more popular with the masses. I respect that, even though I still mostly stick to arabica or liberica, but I love a good experiment and admire the open-mindness on this subject. Outrun Cafe mostly had SUEDHANG coffee to pick from, which I am not a biggest fan of, but it was fun. And the book is definitely in my reading list now.

We also paid a visit to the famous Cafe Regatta, more because of the location and history of this place then for the sake of coffee, since I knew it wasn’t going to be specialty. I do try regular coffee every once in a while though in order not to get biased and all too snobby and I did so especially in Finnland, since coffee is everywhere - supermarkets have coffee stations where you can pour yourself a batch brew to go, restaurants, malls. I noticed this is quite universal for scandinavian countries: coffee culture is big, filter coffee is always fresh, but mostly roasted very dark. The thing is when coffee is so fresh I can enjoy even quite a dark roast every once in a while. At Cafe Regatta e.g. you could select between dark roast and light roast when getting your cup of coffee, without much more detail. I have to say the light roast was dissapointingly dark, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. The cinnamon buns are definitely a must though, they make them all the time fresh and the whole shack is filled with delicious smell.

At some point on our trip I became desperate to find a coffee place that roasts their own beans, so we paid a visit to Kaffa Roastery, that turned out to be a roastery indeed, yaay! They have cool glass panes through which you can see the roasting and cupping setup. Coffee was average I would say, but they had a bunch of cool stickers. The most interesting find was AI-conic coffee - a coffee blend generated with help of AI. A techy long-time customer of the roastery took some data on the bestselling coffee blends and fed it to several large language models to determine the best blend. Pretty cool idea! I got a couple of bags as souveniers for my AI-enthusiastic friends.

From there on we were on a strike - Johan & Nyström turned out to be a roastery too! I think that was my favorite coffee place in terms of location and interior: in the heart of the harbor district facing the water and all the cool ships it was just such a nice place to take an afternoon break from our city adventures. The area reminded me a lot of St. Pete which I most certainly miss a lot and hope to go back to someday in the distant post-war future.

Convinced by reviews and pictures on google maps, we set out to check out another harbor cafe - Maja Coffee Roastery. Located in Merihaka district outside the city centre it was a challenge to get to in the midday heat. The nice stroll around the harbor turned out first into a walk along the dusty highway and then into struggle through an active construction site. The white building looked nothing like a specialty cafe but our startled selves have been welcomed by some very friendly ladies, confirming that we can order coffee and pastry of the day through a small serving window. Glance at Nina sleeping in the sling and our tired and hot expressions and they let us inside into the back yard to cool off in the shade. They asked us to take our shoes off and not take any pictures inside though - turnes out it is some fancy micro public sauna (thus the photo taboo) with a little cafe attached. The interior is in an inuit/native style with clay pots lots of ancient tools etc. Coffee-wise the place was the best imho though and the cake was very delicious too!

We happened to visit Helsinki right during Feast Helsinki, a fine-dining food festival that also showed this year’s MICHELIN Guide Nordic Countries Ceremony that took place in Helsinki in Savoy Theatre as a public viewing. One of the events according to the festival’s website was womens’s roasters coffee tasting, which I obviously got excited about. However this was quite misleading since it turned out to be just a kiosk on the central market offering a couple of coffee bags to buy - there was no tasting really and most of the roasts were dark:( The MICHELIN Star Award Ceremony was fun to watch though - the chefs who got their first star were very excited, sometimes to a point where they started cursing while speaking at this official event, which made the moderator quite uncomfartable.

A random fact that has nothing to do with coffee but which I was very positively impressed with is that finnish supermarkets offer a vast selction of different alcohol-free drinks/wines/mocktails. I think alcohol-free culture is getting bigger and bigger everywhere, but the finns definitely took it to another level. Unfortunately, the drinks are also priced quite highly but I think it is still great to have an alternative for all the people who can’t or choose not to drink alcohol.

As usual, I would like to leave a couple of random recommendations for Helsinki. And yeah it’s junk food but very high quality and delicious and that’s the only places I could afford there anyways, so: