Reykjavík · Iceland
Reykjavík Roasters
Iceland's benchmark roastery does a summer-season cold brew that tastes like the room feels — warm, precise, and completely unhurried.
Cold brew in Iceland sounds like a category error until you're inside Reykjavík Roasters with your hands around a cold glass and the weather doing whatever it wants outside. The city's benchmark roastery — minimalist, exposed brick, a turntable that someone actually flips — treats cold brew as a summer-season special, brewed from whatever single origin is on the roaster that week.
The brew
Light-roast cold brew is easy to get wrong and this is the proof it can go right. Bright without being sour, tea-like body, stone fruit and a honeyed finish that lingers longer than the glass. It changes with the roast schedule, which is either a bug or the whole point, depending on your temperament. I think it's the point.
The space
The room is the Reykjavík coffee scene's living room: wooden benches, roaster in view, bags of beans stacked where furniture should be. Locals treat the communal table like an office; travelers treat it like a museum. Both are correct.
The story
This is the shop that dragged Icelandic coffee into the specialty era, and the seasonal cold brew carries that same seriousness — it appears when they think it should exist and disappears when it shouldn't. Respect.
Verdict: the northernmost great cold brew I've found. If it's on the board, order it.