28 January
a decent conversation with European Coffee Trip.
We know how much people demand a good cup of coffee regardless of where they are in the world. And when you're travelling in a foreign city, don't know the local spots, and there's often a language barrier, it can be... a challenge.
Which is where European Coffee Trip steps in. Your go-to guide in the (European) world of speciality coffee, they've picked out the best places for your beloved flat white, or long black.
Here, European Coffee Trip co-founder Ales, shares how it works and how cafes can get their own site on the popular app, plus of course, some of the best cities in Europe for a banging cup of joe.
First up, can you please tell us a bit about European Coffee Trip and what inspired you to start?
European Coffee Trip is a media platform promoting specialty coffee culture. Since 2014, we have produced hundreds of YouTube videos and short films and visited countless specialty coffee shops across Europe to feature them in our guides and, since 2021, also in our Mobile Apps.
What inspired us to start back in the day was a missing source to learn about the European speciality coffee scene. We could read what's happening in the US or Australia, but since Europe has many countries and languages, no site covered it all. We wanted to change it, and learn as much as we can. That was the beginning of European Coffee Trip.
How do you find new places to include in the app?
Luckily, thousands of specialty coffee lovers use our guides daily, so we have a huge community that helps us discover new specialty cafes. Users can suggest a missing location, and our team then invites the cafe owners to join.
Keeping pace with a growing specialty cafe market is a challenge, we are building the team and systems to make it more efficient with a goal of making it easier for anybody to drink tasty coffee in Europe, while keeping our curation standards high.
If someone wanted to get their site on the map, how can they do this?
In 2021, we launched the ECT business, which is an admin for cafes to submit and edit their cafe profiles. That was a big step in improving the information quality we can share with our users. We ask each cafe to fill in enough information to help our team make the right decision and to help our users pick the right cafe to visit. The key criteria of course (but not the only one!), is serving specialty coffee.
How many people do you have contributing to the maps?
That's a challenging question! Our core team is small—you can find 2-3 people in our studio in Brno, Czech Republic. Then, we have an extended team spread across Europe. Many more contributors help us create content and curate the cafes in our guides. Just this past year, we had over 1000 new cafe suggestions.
What does sustainability mean to you?
For me, with two young kids at home, sustainability means that when they grow up, I want them to have access to resources we have right now, including coffee. It means thinking long term and not short term. It means making hard decisions now that will pay off later. It often means saying no.
What do you think are the top 3 cities in Europe for a good coffee?
It's a good question and tricky answer, since we have over 200 city coffee guides on our site. The good news is that all bigger cities have enough specialty coffee shops, so it's more about a preference or district you are visiting. We are often more excited to add the very first specialty cafe in a small town or village, than adding another location in one of the capital cities.
To answer the question, I think Prague has amazing specialty cafes. Bucharest in Romania has a vibrant and growing specialty coffee scene, and third to mention is Athens, where new specialty locations keep opening - and Greeks simply love their coffee.
Do you think you’ll take European Coffee Trip beyond Europe?
For many years, I said we still had a lot of work to do in Europe. While I still think this is true, the growth of our userbase and investments we are making into Mobile Apps and administration systems, suggest we may consider expanding at some point.
When it comes to content and our Youtube videos, we have already had the chance to travel and film all around the world, so we take inspiration from the global specialty coffee scene.
For our readers who want to come and support you, where can they find you?
I suggest everybody download our Mobile App and give it a try when travelling (or even explore specialty cafes nearby). Then we have a big library of videos on YouTube, but the most active is still our Instagram profile.
