Klaus Thomsen and Coffee Collective: The 2006 World Barista Champion's Copenhagen Roaster

Klaus Thomsen won the 2006 World Barista Championship for Denmark and co-founded Coffee Collective in Copenhagen in 2007. How the roaster started, where it is now, and how it brews.

By Jay Arr Updated

The 2006 World Barista Championship

The World Barista Championship began in 2000 in Monte Carlo, according to the Specialty Coffee Association’s own history of the event, so by 2006 it was in its seventh year. Sprudge’s table of every WBC final shows Thomsen’s record there: third in Trieste in 2004, then champion in Bern in 2006. In the 2006 final, Sammy Piccolo of Canada was second; Anne Lunell of Sweden, later a co-founder of Koppi, was fourth; and James Hoffmann, who won the following year, was fifth.

How Coffee Collective started

Sprudge’s 2017 profile of the company names four co-founders: Thomsen, Peter Nørregaard-Dupont, Casper Engel Rasmussen and Linus Törsäter, who was then leaving to move back to Sweden. Coffee Collective’s own page today names the three who remain as its founders and owners.

According to that profile:

The Jægersborggade shop has since moved to a larger space at Jægersborggade 57, which Coffee Collective describes as “what was once our very first coffee shop, now relocated”.

Coffee Collective today

From Coffee Collective’s own pages, checked October 18, 2026:

Those are the company’s own descriptions; the transparency report is where it publishes the figures.

Brewing the Coffee Collective way

Coffee Collective publishes its own brew guides. Its Kalita Wave recipe uses 16 g of coffee to 250 g of water for one cup, or 32 g to 500 g for two, at 198–203°F (92–95°C):

  1. Grind medium to medium-coarse. If the cup tastes bitter and dry, grind coarser next time; if it’s sour and thin, finer.
  2. Rinse the paper filter, add the coffee and tare the scale.
  3. Start a timer and pour 30 g of water (60 g for two cups) so all the coffee is wet. Let it bloom for 30 seconds.
  4. Pour the rest slowly and steadily, in circles from the center outward and back, reaching 250 g (or 500 g) by about 1:45.
  5. Let it drain; the guide gives a total time of about 1:45 to 2:45, depending on the grind and the coffee. Stir before drinking.

The ratio works out to about 1:15.6, a little stronger than the Brew Guide’s usual 1:16 (calculated). Its French press guide uses 65 g of coffee per liter of water at the same temperature, broken and skimmed at 4 minutes.

Mikaela Wallgren and the Coffee Jobs Podcast

On September 29, 2016, episode 7 of James Hoffmann’s Coffee Jobs Podcast, a series about hiring and careers in coffee, featured Thomsen and Mikaela Wallgren of Coffee Collective. The episode notes introduced Thomsen as a World Barista Champion and co-founder, and Wallgren as a Finnish Brewers Cup Champion who had placed second in the world that year.

Barista Magazine published an interview with Wallgren on October 3, 2016. She had finished less than a tenth of a point behind the 2016 World Brewers Cup champion, Tetsu Kasuya, brewing with a small Kalita Wave. Her competition coffee was an SL28 and SL34 from Kenya’s Kieni cooperative wet mill. She told the magazine she had moved to Copenhagen and started at Coffee Collective in a part-time barista job.

For the podcast as a whole, and what barista jobs pay, see Is coffee a dead-end job?. Copenhagen’s place among specialty coffee cities is on our coffee cities guide, and the movement around it on our third-wave history.

Sources

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