Calm Coffee Roasters

Takahisa Egawa came across coffee roasting in 2018 during a long posting away from home in Kansai, a pastime that pulled at him until he left his original career behind for an early retirement built entirely around beans. He called the project Calm, after the sense of ease a good cup can bring, and spent his first years roasting quietly in the back streets of Yanaka before turning what he had learned into a public coffee course in 2023, teaching roasting to anyone drawn to the same obsession.

On 26 November 2024 that teaching project grew a storefront, a small stand set into the Yanaka Ginza shopping street with backing from a Tokyo metropolitan startup program aimed at keeping the old shotengai lively. Many of the staff behind the counter are graduates of Egawa's own course, pulling hand drip cups as practice for shops of their own, while the shelves carry the house roasted beans and drip bags in rotating seasonal packaging designed for gifting.