Norwegians drink more coffee than almost anyone on earth, and Oslo roasts some of the best in the world.
Norway drinks somewhere around 8 to 9 kilograms of coffee per person per year, which puts it consistently in the top two or three countries in the world, usually behind Finland.
It also, over the last twenty-five years, became one of the most influential coffee-producing cultures on earth — not growing it, but roasting it.
The Nordic roast
The style: light, deliberately, much lighter than Italian or American roasting.
The reasoning is that dark roasting flattens the differences between origins into caramel and smoke, and that a good bean from a specific farm has flavours worth keeping. So Nordic roasters stop earlier, which preserves acidity and fruit and requires much more care in brewing.
If you find it sour, that is the point being pushed too far, and reasonable people disagree about where the line is. If you find it tastes of blackcurrant and stone fruit, that is what the roaster was aiming at.
Filter and pour-over are the default. Espresso exists and is not the main event.
The names
Tim Wendelboe in Grünerløkka. World Barista Champion in 2004, World Cup Tasting Champion in 2005, and the single most influential figure in modern light-roast coffee. The shop is a small roastery with a handful of seats. He also owns a farm in Colombia and sells its coffee here.
Fuglen, a 1963 interior kept as it was — the furniture is for sale — serving coffee by day and cocktails at night. There is a Tokyo branch, which came about because the Japanese speciality scene took Oslo seriously first.
Supreme Roastworks, Talor & Jørgen, Java and Mocca — the last two founded by Robert Thoresen, the first World Barista Champion, in the 1990s, and effectively where all of this started.
Kaffebrenneriet is the local chain and is better than a chain has any right to be.
What to know when ordering
Kaffe means filter coffee, and in an ordinary Norwegian setting it means a mug of it.
Refills are common in traditional cafés and unusual in speciality ones.
A coffee costs roughly what you would expect in London or Copenhagen — which, in Oslo, makes it one of the few things that is not startling.
Cash is essentially gone. Card or phone, everywhere.
Kanelbolle
The thing to eat with it. A cinnamon bun, Norwegian style: cardamom in the dough, a spiral, coarse sugar on top, and larger than seems reasonable.
Every bakery has one and the argument about who does the best is ongoing and unresolvable. Skolebrød — a bun with custard and coconut — is the other classic.
The wider habit
Coffee in Norway is not a café ritual in the way it is in Zagreb or Vienna. It is domestic and constant: at work, at home, on a mountain, out of a thermos in the snow.
Kokekaffe — grounds boiled in a pot over a fire and settled with a splash of cold water — is what you will be given in a cabin in Nordmarka, and it is very good in a way that has nothing to do with any of the above.
