Specialty coffee in Berlin: 129 checked cafés

There was a time in Berlin when you tracked coffee by smell: Frederick II made roasting a state monopoly and put four hundred official sniffers on the streets. At night they worked their way along kitchen windows, by day they stood at the bridges, and Berliners called them the most hated Frenchmen in the city. A tin of royal coffee cost a thaler, the same coffee in Hamburg four groschen, so it came in smuggled in sacks of coal, under the skirts of market women and in coffins. The nose only caught roasted beans, so the trade switched to green ones, and roasting coffee in a Berlin kitchen became, for a few years, an underground skill.