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A wave of obsessive micro-roasters is turning South Korea’s capital into a mandatory stop for serious coffee drinkers.
On an rainy summer afternoon in Seoul, Chulwon Lee runs a batch of yellowish-green coffee beans through a destoner in his roaster.
“In Korea, coffee is like an energy drink,” explains Lee, the owner of Deep Blue Lake. “People drink it to stay awake, or because they need a place to sit with friends. And it costs less than alcohol.”
Making specialty coffee is exacting work. The destoner, a tall, upright metal box made of stainless steel, separates beans from heavier foreign objects that may have been mixed in during harvesting or drying. After he roasts them, a thick aroma of coffee and toast fills his crowded shop.
Lee measures the color of the finished beans, a medium-dark brown, against a target number. Then he brews several batches and checks the coffee at three intervals — 10, 20 and 40 minutes — to find out whether the flavor holds together as it cools.
Deep Blue Lake is one of several small roasters that is putting Seoul’s coffee scene on the map. In Mapo-gu, a residential district in the western part of the city, there’s a coffee shop or roaster on almost every street corner, pouring everything from exotic blends to old-school charcoal-roasted espresso. Tourists are starting to notice.
The rapid growth of Seoul cafes and coffee shops
Korea’s café count has more than doubled in seven years. The country had 45,203 registered coffee and beverage shops in early 2018, according to the National Tax Service. By the first quarter of 2025 there were 95,337, an increase of 111%. That works out to roughly one coffee shop for every 540 people.
Most of that volume moves fast and cheap. Mega Coffee and Compose Coffee sell an Americano for 1,500 won (a little over $1) and students settle into the booths for the afternoon to study and socialize. But a significant part of the coffee scene leans heavily toward specialty coffees, harvested in Kenya, Ethiopia and Honduras — and the mood in these micro-roasters is less study hall and more swanky cocktail party.
Mangwon Market is a short walk from all three roasters, drawing a steady stream of visitors past the doors. Some have no clue about Seoul’s diverse coffee scene until they arrive. No other city packs this much coffee into this little space — or this much disagreement about how to make it.
Deep Blue Lake brings specialty coffee to Mapo-gu
A place like Deep Blue Lake might look obsessive in Seattle or Melbourne, but not in Seoul. Lee became fascinated by coffee and started experimenting with specialty blends in his shop.
“A lot of baristas think they can fix a bad cup at the machine,” he says. “For a roaster, everything is decided before the heat ever touches the bean. If the green coffee has no life in it, it’s nothing.”
Lee labels green beans by their color, holds the combinations in his head, and then blends them. When new green coffee arrives, Lee measures its moisture content and adjusts the roast, since a wet bean and a dry one behave differently in the drum. He switches to a new dripper every three months to see what it does to extraction.
On the counter one recent morning, two pour-over setups stood side by side, one built on a Japanese method and one copied from a competition winner, brewing the same coffee two ways so a customer could taste the difference.
The specification on the house pour-over: half an ounce of coffee, 8 ounces of water, 199 degrees. The shop’s signature Shenzhen blend, served as espresso, is one of his flagship offerings.
Lee’s standard for a good cup explains the three-stage tasting. Plenty of cafés serve coffee that impresses on the first sip and turns watery a few minutes later, he says. Great coffee should behave like wine and hold its character as it cools. He isn’t checking whether a roast tastes good. He’s checking whether it stays that way.
The rising cost of rare micro-lot coffee beans
The economics of running a roaster are fascinating and unforgiving. Lee buys green coffee the slow way, cupping a table of samples and rejecting most of them.
In one recent week, he tried 23 lots and bought just four. Some tasting sessions produce nothing.Most of what he sells retails between $20 and $30 per 100 grams. Then there are the auction micro-lots he buys because “I can’t help myself,” reaching $1,500 a kilogram (about $680 per pound).
Lee blames the top of that market on new money. Buyers in China and the Middle East have moved into purchasing rare lots, he says. Because those lots depend on weather and arrive in small volumes, prices keep climbing. Suppliers won’t send free samples at that level, so he visits other cafés and buys a single cup to decide whether to commit to a kilo.
Set that against the $1 Americano down the street, and the distance between Korea’s two coffee economies becomes a number rather than an impression.
M1CT focuses on single-origin specialty coffee
M1CT, a few city blocks away, is all about the atmosphere on a recent overcast morning. Nordic-style tables, wooden benches, a display case of whole beans, plastic bins of green behind the counter, and a small roaster against the back wall. A Miles Davis soundtrack plays from a laptop.
Minkuen Kim is a self-described coffee purist. He and his wife started the coffee shop and roaster eight years ago after a chance visit to a coffee chain led them down the road to specialty coffee.
“I began with regular Starbucks coffee,” he says. “But after discovering specialty coffee, I decided ‘This is what I want to do.’ So I opened this place.”
On a rainy weekday morning, Kim’s featured coffee is a medium-roast Kenya AA with notes of grapefruit, red currant and black tea. One guest also detected a hint of caraway. It’s served in plain mugs without cream or sugar, more like a wine tasting than a traditional coffee shop. But he has no illusions about why his customers come here every day.
“The reason Koreans like coffee is probably to stay awake,” he says.
Kim also holds a position that puts him at odds with a good part of Seoul. He won’t serve co-fermented coffee, the increasingly popular processing style where fruit or yeast is introduced during fermentation to push flavor in a specific direction. He buys green by country and wants the cup to taste like where it came from.
PP Coffee draws tourists with traditional charcoal roasting
Another Mapo-gu institution, PP Coffee, draws a crowd — and the crowd is holding phones.
Owner Choi Byoung Song roasts coffee only over hardwood charcoal, an older and more difficult method than a gas-fired drum. He builds his own equipment and turns out new funnels between shifts.
“People think it’s strange to be roasting coffee on charcoal,” he explains. “But the coffee tastes very good.”
Byung Song has the demeanor of a wise coffee master, and his technique is decidedly old school. He brews through a cloth filter with a heavy dose of grounds, and the cup that results is closer to a full serving of espresso than drip coffee. The name “PP” is the combination of the “P” from coffee (pi) and “P” from the Philippines, where he and his wife grow three hectares of Arabica.
“Just like each customer is different, each cup of coffee is different,” says his wife, Yoon.
Visitors come to marvel at his coffee brewing skills. On a busy Sunday morning, he juggles three filters while taking orders from his customers. A visitor records the spectacle of him darting between taking orders, grinding beans and pouring water. Although Byung song shrugs it off, his coffee shop is becoming a tourist attraction.
In a fully caffeinated destination, here’s how to stand out
Just as Seoul’s coffee culture starts grabbing the world’s attention, the business is fighting for room. Korea’s registered coffee and beverage shops are showing signs of getting frothy. Their numbers peaked at 96,080 in early 2024 and have leveled off since then. It seems Seoul is fully caffeinated, and the shops that have stayed open are competing against a latte that costs less than the milk in it. The profit margins are as thin as the crema on a rushed espresso shot.
Being different can make you stand out. Deep Blue Lake buys small-batch lots that cost more per kilo than most cafés spend on a month of beans. Choi roasts over charcoal because almost nobody else does. Kim built a room around a jazz soundtrack and a Kenya AA he won’t ferment. Three shops within three blocks, and not one of them is trying to sell you the same cup.
The survival strategy in Seoul is to diversify, to stand apart. Anyone can sell you a $1 iced Americano. But a blend of seven different coffees and notes of green apple, floral, and cherry is a one of a kind. You may even create a tourist attraction in the process.