Tim Wendelboe started as a barista in Oslo in 1998, at a small chain called Stockfleths. He was nineteen. Within a few years he had won the Norwegian Barista Championship three times, finished second at the World Barista Championship twice, and then won it in 2004. The following year he took the World Cup Tasters Championship as well. By any measure available at the time, he was the best competition barista in the world.
He left Stockfleths in 2006, spent a year consulting, and opened his own place on 30 June 2007. The room had been a hair salon. The woman who owned the building had run it for years, and her father, a mason, laid the stone façade in the 1890s — two silhouettes of heads are still carved into the stone beside the entrance. Tim kept them there.
ROAST EDIT stocks Tim Wendelboe in the UK. You can browse the current lineup in our Tim Wendelboe collection.
A Side Street in Grünerløkka
He chose the street deliberately. Grünersgate is a side street in Grünerløkka, and he did not want a shop people wandered into by accident. What they were going to do would look unlike most coffee bars, and he wanted guests arriving with some idea of what they were in for. The budget helped make the decision — the only rents he could afford were on side streets. In the early years the roaster sat inside the shop, which was not a quiet arrangement for anyone nearby.
The bar has sold only coffee since the day it opened. They tried pastries briefly, found the quality inconsistent, and stopped. The menu changes daily. The only things added to the coffee are milk and sugar. Tim has described the bar as a showroom for their coffees, which is another way of saying the coffee is the point.
The roastery moved a few blocks to Tøyengata in 2018. The bar stayed at its original address. They roast to order every week and ship worldwide.
The Roasting Argument
Tim Wendelboe is one of the names most closely associated with what gets called the Nordic roasting style: light, clean, built around sweetness and acidity rather than the flavours roasting itself contributes. The reasoning is straightforward. A lighter roast preserves more of what the coffee actually tasted like at origin, which means there is nowhere for a mediocre green coffee to hide. Roast that way and you are forced to buy better, which in turn means getting closer to the farms.
This is why the sourcing and the roasting are difficult to discuss separately. One is a consequence of the other.
Publishing What They Pay
They buy directly from farms in Kenya, Ethiopia, Colombia, Honduras and El Salvador, visit every year, and publish what they paid. The transparency reports have run since 2010 — an annual document giving the price per kilogram, farm by farm. It was unusual then and it remains unusual now. The argument behind it is blunt: a claim about sustainability that cannot be checked is not worth much, and the simplest thing to make checkable is the money.
Several of the relationships in those reports are now more than a decade old. Finca Tamana in Huila has been supplying them since 2012. Echemo in Ethiopia since 2018. Continuity of that length changes what a roaster can ask for, because the conversation stops being about this year's lot and starts being about how the farm is run.
The Farms
Echemo is a 35-hectare farm near Agaro in south west Ethiopia, owned by Khalid Shifa, a third-generation farmer who inherited the land from his father. It is fully organic certified — no pesticides, herbicides, fungicides or mineral fertilisers, with weeds removed by hand. Most of the trees are over eighty years old and have never been pruned; the canopy closes above you when you walk the rows, and pickers climb to reach the cherries at the top. The cultivars have no commercial name. The seeds came from wild trees in the neighbouring Coche forest, passed down through Khalid's family. Tim first visited in late 2018 and has worked with him since to develop washed processing on the farm, for which Khalid built a small wet mill.
Finca Tamana sits at El Pital in Huila and is farmed by Elias Roa and Bellanid Sanchez. It is the roastery's longest-running producer relationship and appears in the range across several different cultivars in any given year, which makes it one of the few farms where you can taste the variable isolated — same soil, same hands, different genetics.
Finca el Puente, at Chinacla in La Paz, Honduras, is run by Marysabel Caballero and Moisés Herrera. Their Geisha is a useful corrective to the ones the variety is famous for: the floral aromatics and citric acidity are there, but grown in Honduras it carries a heavier body and slightly lower acid intensity than the Panamanian benchmarks.
Los Pirineos is in the Tecapa-Chinameca range in Usulután, El Salvador. Gilberto Baraona planted a wide selection of Pacamara there over many years and placed repeatedly in the El Salvador Cup of Excellence with it before he died; his son Diego runs the farm now. Pacamara is an unusually unstable cultivar — it was distributed to Salvadoran farmers before it had settled, so seed from an existing tree does not reliably reproduce the parent. Decades of selection on one farm is worth a great deal when that is what you are working with.
In Kenya they buy from wet mills rather than estates, which is how most Kenyan coffee reaches the market: several hundred smallholders deliver cherry to a central mill. Nyeri and the slopes of Mount Elgon are the two areas that recur.
Since 2019 Tim has also been farming his own coffee. Finca el Suelo is seven hectares in El Vegón, next to Finca Tamana, and it has not gone smoothly — they planted, and by 2018 most of the trees were dead because the soil was not healthy enough to support them. They replanted and rebuilt the approach around compost as the primary input. Around 600 trees are now producing. The 2024 harvest yielded roughly fifty kilograms of green coffee across the best selections, which tells you plainly that this is a learning project before it is a commercial one.
Ten Years to Regenerative
In 2023 they set a public target: by 2034, every coffee they buy should come from a regenerative farming system. The TW Biological Project, run with Biofilia, a team based in Mexico, works across the farms they source from in Central and South America on soil health, biodiversity, and reducing the input costs that erode producer margins over time.
Ten years is a long horizon to commit to in writing, and the reason it takes that long is the same reason it matters: soil does not respond to a purchasing decision. It responds to a decade of them.
What We Stock
Tim Wendelboe sell single origins only, and the range turns over with each harvest — coffees arrive, run, and are replaced by the next lot from the same farm or a different one entirely. Our selection rotates with theirs.
For UK drinkers the practical case is simple. Norway is outside the EU, direct orders from Oslo carry the shipping cost and the customs wait, and the coffees are roasted to order on a weekly cycle that does not bend around a single overseas customer. Buying them here removes all of that.
Browse the current Tim Wendelboe range at ROAST EDIT.