About Father Carpenter
What was the seed?
To elevate hospitality and gastronomy in Berlin by providing a positive, authentic and memorable experience to all guests, and to inspire others to follow suit.
Opened in January 2015 we started with what could only be called 'a bang followed by its vacuum'.
A rush of people far greater than our tiny team could handle followed by the more standard slow start to a new business year. The early days were purpose driven and well executed and relatively quickly Berlin accepted the new kid on
the block. FC is now more like a Berlin institution and we are still purpose driven.
Our Coffee
We have a modern approach to coffee and coffee roasting, you could call it a romantic and puritan approach.
We believe that each of our green coffees has a peak potential for flavour and that flavour is intrinsic. It is our job to roast the coffee enough to be soluble, bright and sweet, while not roasting it so much that you taste flavours imparted by the roasting process.
We believe that coffee should be bright, sweet and clean as a minimum requirement.
The brightness comes from retaining the acidity that is naturally present in the high altitude coffees that we buy. All drink and food that has acidity has life and vibracy. We keep this in our coffees.
The sweetness comes from three factors: First, the coffee that we buy was picked at its peak ripeness and had a high Brix content (sugar content). Secondly, we develop the coffee (ensure the inside is roasted) enough so that there is high solubility and the water used to brew can access the available sugar, and thirdly, we roast our coffee light which means that reducing sugar (caramelizing) does not happen too much.
A modern approach to coffee.
Our approach to Hospitality
The way we like to think of it is as follows: Service is to do something too someone - ie, give them cutlery before their meal comes. Hospitality is to do something for someone - ie. Noticing that they're left handed and so switching the cutlery around to suit them better.
In the early days of Father Carpenter we had a lot of discussion about what we believed hospitality to be and it took quite a while for us to realise that becuase we serve a customer base with an incredibly diverse cultural background and upbringing, our version of hospitality may not be someone elses. Often we thought we were doing something for a guest and it would be met with friction rather than a smile and appreciation. Because of this we went back to the drawing board and went into further discussions and arrived at the following:
Our version of being hospitable is to focus our energy on reducing what we like to call 'negative sticky spots', or moments in the guests time with us that would not be remembered fondly. An example of this would be something like - guest arrives to FC for the first time, does not know if they should wait at the door to be seated, or take a seat themselves, whether to order at the counter or to wait for a waiter, etc. It was our priority number one to get in there before any negative emotion, clearly explain the process and what we do, and get that person feeling comfortable, as pleasure is simply existence without the negative.
This is our version of hospitality - to reduce negative sticky spots.
Our Approach to Transparency
Transparency is honesty, and we are honest. Father Carpenter is about simple pleasures and the sanctity of hospitality, and honesty is a big part of this.
Yearly, we will release our Transparency report where we outline where we bought coffee from and the total amount of information we have on the coffees.
We are vehemently against green washing that plagues the coffee industry.
October, 2014
Father Carpenter Pop Up
In October the ability to renovate the original cafe space was still unavailable, but Kresten was keen to begin serving coffee to Berlin so he setup a coffee pop-up in the courtyard behind the original Berlin 14oz store.
January, 2015
Officially open the doors
During Fashion Week of 2015 we opened the first iteration of FC - the 80m2 space with a miniscule kitchen with no air movement.
December, 2015
Roasting small batches in cellar
Started thinking of opening a coffee roastery.
Roasting small amounts of filter coffee on a borrowed Huky 500. We needed to roast late at night due to the amount of smoke and smell it produced.
February, 2016
Co-found Fjord Coffee Roasters
Together with Silo Coffee we opened the coffee roastery and co-founded Fjord Coffee Roasters.
August, 2016
Open F.C To-Go
The idea was that no one should have to wait longer than 5 minutes for a take away drink or food, as they are busy and we should respect their time. Our cafe was already quite busy, and we wanted to open a space that allowed us to sell more retail goods, hold public cuppings and produce take away goods fast, and so FC ToGo was born.
June, 2017
Open 2nd seating space
The struggling business next door moved out, and we moved in, expanding our seating from 30 indoor seats to 75 indoor seats.
This expansion was the turning point for FC. We finally had enough space.
August, 2021
Opened Cafe Patricia
A short but beautiful flame.
The covid pandemic did it's work on this all day bistrot and as a result we closed the doors in January 2022.
A big shame, as the concept was fantastic - buy the best products we can find (Sicilian citrus fruits, Greek cold pressed olive oil, etc) and serve small plates that can be shared with a bottle of low intervention wine or a single origin coffee. Simple and beautiful.
June, 2023
Create F.C coffee
We thought it was time to let Fjord be Fjord and FC be FC, and so we disconnected, sourced our own green coffee, and started roasting our own coffee.
Our desired preference for roast profiles was a little different and so spurred on our roasting approach of 'fast and light'. You can read more about this approach HERE.