TANAT is a specialty roastery based in Paris, founded in 2016 by Alexis Gagnaire under the name Kawa Coffee. It started the way a lot of serious coffee businesses do: someone left France, discovered what coffee could be somewhere else — in Alexis's case, London — and came back unwilling to accept the status quo. At the time, fine coffee in France was largely a niche curiosity. He set about changing that. The roastery evolved, the name changed to TANAT, and nearly a decade later it's one of the most respected names in European specialty coffee.
They run three cafés in Paris, and in 2024 their Victoria location was ranked among the world's top ten independent coffee shops. Alexis himself is a competition roaster — 2nd place at the French Coffee Roasting Championship in 2021 — and a competitive barista who placed 3rd at the World AeroPress Championship in 2019 and 8th at the World Brewers Cup in Athens in 2023. The competition background shows in the range: TANAT stock everything from approachable terroir coffees to competition-grade lots that most UK retailers don't touch.
Their sourcing philosophy is direct and long-term. They build relationships with specific farms and producers over years, selecting lots for terroir, process precision, and the philosophy of the people growing them. One thing they're clear about: they will never make capsules. It's a small detail, but it tells you something about how seriously they take coffee as a craft.
Alexis is also co-founder of People Possession — a Paris-based creative coffee collective that sits alongside TANAT as a more experimental, design-led project. If TANAT is the main stage, People Possession is the side project that doesn't follow the rules.
The Coffees
TANAT's range spans terroir-driven single origins, innovative process lots, and competition-grade rarities. Two examples of what they do well:
Panama — Hacienda La Esmeralda [Buenos Aires 3BANC]
If you follow specialty coffee at any depth, you already know the name. Hacienda La Esmeralda is the Peterson family's estate on the volcanic slopes of Volcán Barú in Boquete, Panama — the farm that put Geisha on the map.
In 2004, the Petersons entered a Geisha lot from their Jaramillo plot into the Best of Panama competition. The judges were stunned. It won, and sold at auction for $21 per pound — roughly ten times the going rate for high-quality coffee at the time. That moment changed the trajectory of the entire specialty coffee industry, opening a conversation about rarity, terroir, and what coffee is genuinely capable of in the cup.
Two decades later, Esmeralda Geisha still commands the highest auction prices in the world. In 2025, a lot sold for $30,204 per kilogram.
This particular lot comes from the Buenos Aires section of the estate. It's a competition-level microlot, released in tiny quantities. Geisha from Esmeralda isn't something you brew on autopilot. What you get in return is the variety at its most refined: intense florals, delicate stone fruit, a perfumy clarity that's difficult to describe until you taste it.
See the Geishas currently in stock →
Colombia — Nestor Lasso [Typica Mejorado Natural]
Nestor Lasso runs El Diviso farm in Pitalito, Huila, alongside his brother Adrián. They represent a generation of Colombian producers who have gone beyond growing excellent coffee into engineering how it's processed — using multi-stage fermentations, precise timing, and significant technical investment to shape what ends up in the cup.
TANAT have worked with Nestor across several varieties over the years. The Typica Mejorado is a variety rare enough in Colombia that it's worth pausing on. Genetic testing has shown it to be a cross between Bourbon and an Ethiopian landrace — which goes some way to explaining its cup character: the full sweetness of Bourbon alongside the aromatic complexity more associated with African varieties. The grains are elongated and uniformly dense, with a high sugar content that shows in fermentation. Nestor's processing is meticulous, designed to draw out the aromatics without losing structure.
A technically exceptional coffee at a price point that makes it genuinely accessible for what it is.
Why We Stock Them
French specialty roasting has quietly become some of the most technically precise in Europe, and TANAT are at the centre of it. They roast with a clear point of view — sweetness, purity, and respect for origin — and they select producers who share that standard.