Craft guide
ORBISTEA & COFFEE MERCHANTS IN CAPE TOWN5 stores · curated ORBIS register
Cape Town
Cedar Coffee Roasters, run by "two simple guys from Cape Town," roasts coffee beans sourced from Ethiopia, Colombia, Kenya and Costa Rica and sells decaf, seasonal blends and compostable coffee pods from a unit at Side Street Studios, 48 Albert Road, Woodstock. It also sells brewing equipment such as drippers, French presses, grinders and scales.
Best for Single-origin roasted coffee beans and brew gear
South Peninsula, Cape Town
Coffee Guy Roasters operates a roastery in Fish Eagle Park, Kommetjie, in Cape Town's South Peninsula and a flagship coffee shop at Noordhoek Garden Emporium on Noordhoek Main Road. It sells freshly roasted Arabica beans plus croissants and breakfast rolls, with free delivery around Cape Town on orders over R500.
Best for Freshly roasted arabica coffee beans
Cape Town / Online
Founded in 2005 by Joel Singer, Origin was among Cape Town's first specialty roasters. Its barista academy has since trained 3,500 baristas and five national champions.
Best for Hand-roasted African coffee from the academy that trained 3,500 SA baristas.
Origin opened in late 2005, one of the first artisan roasters to set up in Cape Town, at a time when the city's specialty coffee scene barely existed as a category. Joel Singer and the founding team built the business around a simple ambition: prove South African coffee could meet international specialty standards rather than settle for commodity-grade imports.
The roastery's flagship sits in De Waterkant, where coffee is still hand-roasted on site — the company describes itself as roasting "at the southernmost tip of Africa," leaning into direct relationships and repeat visits to origin-country growers rather than buying through blind auction lots.
Origin's other lasting contribution to South African coffee is educational rather than retail: its barista academy trained roughly 3,500 baristas and produced five national barista champions before the program transitioned into the independent African School of Coffee. That training pipeline, as much as the roastery itself, is why Origin gets credited with helping build the country's specialty coffee workforce rather than just selling beans into it.
Today the business runs as a hybrid — café, online retail and wholesale supply to hotels and restaurants — nearly twenty years after it started as a single roastery.
Woodstock
Single-origin coffee roaster founded in 2010 in Cape Town's Woodstock district by Rob Cowles, Jono le Feuvre and Jeffrey van Aswegen; roasts only traceable single-origin lots from Africa, Central/South America and Asia, no blends.
Best for Specialty roaster focusing on African coffees with a tasting bar in Woodstock
Rosetta Roastery was co-founded by Jono Le Feuvre and runs a tasting bar in Woodstock, Cape Town's specialty-coffee district, built around a selective sourcing process: the team says it cups more than 150 different coffees a year and keeps only the ones that clear a high bar for quality, rather than filling out a standing catalogue with safe, easy-to-source lots. The current list leans toward South American origins — Peru and Brazil feature prominently — alongside the African coffees the roastery has built its reputation on. Rosetta splits its lineup into two house categories, "Classic" and "Progressive," a way of signalling roast philosophy up front rather than leaving customers to guess whether a bag will taste like a familiar dark-roast standard or a brighter, more experimental profile. The team treats coffee as something that "doesn't stay static," adjusting roast profiles on an ongoing basis rather than locking in a fixed recipe per origin once it's approved.
City Centre, Cape Town
David Donde opened Truth in 2012 inside an 1898 Victorian warehouse on Buitenkant Street. Architect Haldane Martin's steampunk design has made it one of the world's best-known cafés.
Best for Steampunk Cape Town roastery in an 1898 Victorian warehouse
David Donde opened Truth Coffee Roasting in 2012 on Buitenkant Street, having taught himself to roast during an earlier career as a hotelier — he'd supply freshly roasted coffee to weekend guests before turning the hobby into a business. The site he chose was an 1898 Victorian warehouse, stripped back during renovation and rebuilt around a steampunk aesthetic designed by architect Haldane Martin.
Martin's brief drew a direct line between the visual complexity of espresso machines and roasters and the Victorian-futurist fantasy of steampunk design: the finished café is dense with saw-blade tabletops, exposed steel plating, black cabling and overstuffed booths, built to look mechanically ornate rather than minimalist. The roasting equipment itself sits in view, part of the design rather than hidden behind a counter.
The combination — Donde's self-taught roasting background paired with Martin's maximalist industrial design — has made Truth one of Cape Town's most internationally written-about cafés, cited repeatedly in design and coffee press for the same reason: it looks like nowhere else serving coffee.
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