Bugan Coffee Lab

Nothing on the bar is a blend

Every coffee here is a single origin, selected by one of the sibling founders on trips to the farms themselves. The roasting runs light, light enough that the roastery is counted among the ones pushing Italian coffee furthest from the dark espresso default, and the lots change often enough that a regular can drink something new most weeks.

The list reads like a cupping table. Kayon Mountain from Guji and Aricha from Yirgacheffe in Ethiopia, Shantawene from Sidama, La Pastora from Tarrazú in Costa Rica, Nirvana Peaberry from Volcán in Panama. Processing covers natural, washed, natural anaerobic nitrogen and double submerged natural, and the tasting notes run to blueberry, wild strawberry, rose, lemon, bergamot tea, peach, jasmine and caramelised sweetness.

A lab, a cupping room and an academy

The name is accurate. Bugan opened in December 2014, after a trip to the coffee plantations of Panama, as a roastery, coffee academy, cupping room and café under one roof, and it still works that way. Coffee is tasted, compared and taught here as much as it is drunk, and the family had already been running a Bergamo café since 2000 before the lab existed.

What that means in practice: cuppings, workshops, SCA Coffee Skills Program courses and certificated training alongside the bar, plus what the house calls Italy’s first omakase specialty coffee tasting, a guided sequence rather than a menu you order from. The shelves carry the brewing kit to match, with Aeropress, Chemex, French press, moka, V60, kettles, Comandante grinders and Huskee cups.

How to use it

Come during the day and let the bar lead. Selections change frequently and new proposals appear weekly, so the honest advice is to ask what is open rather than to arrive with an order in mind. The upper-town site is a small room on the main street of Bergamo Alta; there is a second presence in the lower town.

If you want the full version, take the omakase tasting, which walks through origin, process, roast style and brewing method in sequence. If you want to take something home, the roastery sells competition lots, tasting boxes, subscriptions and capsules. The team is around ten people, and their competition record is serious: multiple Italian national coffee titles and two podium finishes at world level.