Coffee Wrights Kuramae

Yuki Mune left a roasting job at Blue Bottle's Japan operation in December 2016 to open a counter of her own in Sangenjaya, wanting to talk about the coffee she roasted with the people actually drinking it instead of staying behind a bigger brand. A few months later Takuto Sakaibara, a roaster who also plays free jazz and improvised music, joined her, and the two built out the roasting side of the business into what is now a small group of shops carrying the Coffee Wrights name.

The Kuramae address is the roastery itself, a ground floor space that rolls its glass doors open onto the street behind sacks of green coffee and a rolling wooden cart stacked with retail bags, with cafe seating for about fourteen people upstairs. Beans move through direct relationships with growers, including a Rwandan lot grown under a soil health project run with Onibus Coffee, and the oat milk option sits right alongside the usual espresso and hand drip menu. Sister locations have since opened in Omotesando and, in partnership with Higuma Doughnuts, in Kyoto.