The Crown: Royal Coffee Lab & Tasting Room

A green coffee importer opened its lab to the public

The Crown is Royal Coffee's tasting room, and Royal Coffee imports green beans. That relationship explains everything about the place: the counter pours from the crop the company is currently buying, and the rooms behind it exist to teach people how to judge it. It opened in March 2019 as an education centre as much as a café, with the stated aim of following coffee from picker to barista in public and putting supply-chain transparency where customers can see it.

Four rooms, and a roasting floor

The building splits into a Tasting Room, a Presentation Room, a Brew Lab and a Roast Lab, with a movable Nanawall glass system that lets it run as one large hall or four independent spaces. Skylights sit in a twenty-seven-foot ceiling, the bars are modular, and the fit-out draws on Fellow, La Marzocco and Loring. In the Tasting Room there is an eight-tap system, counter heights varied for drinks and light bites, and a mobile modular bar called Naaga that can be moved wherever a session needs it.

The Roast Lab is the part that gives the building away: a Proaster two-barrel sample roaster, a 5kg Diedrich IR, a 15kg Loring Smart Roast, a 1kg Aillio Bullet, two Ikawa sample roasters and a ColorTrack laser colour analyser. That is quality-control equipment rather than café equipment, and cuppings, classes, SCA courses and Q courses all run around it.

What to drink, and what to sign up for

The drinks menu rotates with the crop. Espresso has run as two single origins plus a decaf, with two batch filters alongside, one light roast and one dark, so a single visit can cover four coffees without ordering anything unusual. Pour-overs, cold brew, nitro and signature drinks fill out the rest.

Food is deliberately light: a small selection of cakes and pastries, light bites at the tasting counters, and shared appetisers at events. The room reads as a working lab rather than a lounge, with glass walls in wooden frames, standing space, fold-up tables at the front window and seating outside. Come for a coffee if that is all you want. The better reason to come is a cupping, a class, or one of the pop-ups and events the building was designed to absorb.