Dak Coffee Roasters: Specialty Coffee in Oud West, Amsterdam

## Dak Coffee Roasters The name means roof in Dutch, a nod to the moment co-founder Louis-Philippe decided, somewhere above Amsterdam, to start a roastery. That origin story says something about how Dak operates: decisions made from a high vantage point, with a clear view of what they're after. The Nieuwendammerdijk location is a roastery first, showroom second. You're not walking into a café. There's no background playlist curated to set a mood, no counter stacked with pastries. What there is: a Slayer three-group pulling espresso, two Decent machines running filter, and a roster of single origins with names like Coco Bongo, Pink Floyd, and Strawberry Kiss that sound playful until you taste them and realise the names are doing accurate descriptive work. Louis-Philippe and Veronique, the Canadian duo behind the operation, roast Monday to Thursday on an IMF machine, a relatively rare piece of kit that produces the kind of clean, sweet, structurally bright profiles their menu is built around. The bean list spans Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Colombia, Bolivia, and beyond, with a particular lean toward process-forward and co-fermented lots that reward attention. The Cream Donut espresso, chocolate milk, cherry liquor, vanilla, is a useful entry point if the experimental end of the menu feels overwhelming. The Coco Bongo is for when it doesn't. Geisha makes an appearance on the menu, and the filter programme on the Decents is where the roastery's sourcing philosophy becomes most legible. V60, Chemex, and pour over are all on the table, and the staff are equipped to talk through what's on the bar with the kind of specificity that only comes from being close to the roasting process. This is also a retail and education space, workshops and events run through the calendar, and the showroom is set up to facilitate direct conversation between roaster and customer in a way that a busy café floor never allows. If you're buying beans to take home, this is the place to ask the questions you can't ask at a third-party stockist. For the full café format with Dak coffee, their partner venue Saint Jean in the Jordaan is worth knowing about. But if the coffee itself is the point, the sourcing, the roasting decisions, the experimental lots, the source is in Noord.