Монограм ★9.1

Calgary’s coffee scene is unusual in one specific way: the city’s best baristas keep beating the rest of the country, and then they keep staying in Calgary. Monogram Coffee is the sharpest expression of that. Three baristas who met working the bar at Phil & Sebastian built a hand-made coffee cart, turned it into a roastery, and have since collected a stack of national titles that no other Canadian company comes close to. The downtown location sits inside an office tower in the business core — which sounds like a compromise until you order.

Highlights

• Ten Canadian Barista Championship titles. The company’s people have won the national title ten times between them, and one of the founders took third place at the World Barista Championship in 2025 — this is a competition team that happens to run cafés.
• They roast their own. Monogram is a roastery first, so what is in the hopper here was bought, profiled and roasted by the same company that serves it.
• Named farms, not named countries. The sourcing list runs to specific estates — Finca Takesi in Bolivia, Finca Deborah and the Lamastus family’s Elida in Panama, Daterra in Brazil — with relationships that have run for years rather than for a season.
• A business-core café that keeps office hours. This location works the downtown week and closes for the weekend, which is the honest trade-off of a tower address.
• Pour-over is treated as a real order. Filter is not a grudging concession here; it is the format in which the expensive lots actually make sense.
• Coffee Discovery Sessions. The company runs tasting and education sessions for the public, which is rare for a roastery of this size and tells you where its instincts lie.

What’s in the cup

Monogram roasts everything it serves, and the sourcing is the part worth understanding. Rather than buying whatever a broker has on the sheet, the company works with named estates and keeps returning to them: Finca Takesi, a famously high-altitude farm in Bolivia; Finca Deborah in Panama’s Chiriquí highlands; the Lamastus family’s Elida estate, one of the names that shows up year after year at the top of the Panamanian auctions; Daterra in Brazil for volume with consistency. These are not decorative credits. Long relationships mean the roastery can plan, the farm can invest, and the same lot can be revisited across harvests instead of appearing once and vanishing.

In practice that gives the bar a two-track offer. There is a house espresso built to survive milk and repetition — the drink that gets a downtown office through a Tuesday — and then there is the filter side, where the more expensive and more particular coffees live. If you have only ever drunk this company’s espresso in a flat white, you have met perhaps a third of what it does. Ask what is on pour-over; that is where the sourcing shows up.

The competition record matters here in a concrete rather than a trophy-cabinet sense. A team that spends its year measuring extractions for a stage in front of judges brings that measuring back behind the bar: recipes are dialled deliberately, staff are trained rather than merely rostered, and the answer to “why does it taste like that” is a real answer. Monogram also sells beans for home brewing with grind options for drip, French press and Aeropress, so the relationship does not end at the counter.

Who’s behind it

Monogram was founded in 2014 by Jeremy Ho, Ben Put and Justin Eyford. All three had worked at Phil & Sebastian, the roastery that did more than any other to make Calgary a serious coffee city, and the lineage explains a lot about the standard they set from day one. They did not start with a lease and a build-out; they started with a coffee cart they built themselves, parked in an art and design space, which is about as low as the barrier to entry gets.

The first permanent café opened in Altadore in the same year, and the company grew from there into a small group of Calgary rooms plus a wholesale and export business, with a sister project in Vancouver. The founders were recognized together on Avenue Calgary’s Top 40 Under 40 list, which is a fair marker of how the city itself reads them: not as three people who make coffee, but as builders of one of Calgary’s export-grade businesses. Ben Put in particular has been the public competition face, with a long run of Canadian titles and a third place on the world stage in 2025.

What it’s good for

This is a downtown weekday café, and it is honest about that. It is built for the office day: the pre-meeting espresso, the walk-out from a tower at mid-morning, the takeaway cup carried back through the skywalks, the short sit-down with a colleague where the point is the conversation and not the furniture. If you work in the core, it is one of the few places within a few minutes’ walk where the coffee is genuinely at national-competition level rather than merely acceptable.

It is a poor choice for a long laptop shift, and not because anyone is unfriendly. A café inside a business tower runs on turnover: seating is finite, the lunch surge is real, and there is a queue of people with fifteen minutes. Nobody will stand over you, but the room does not reward camping, and it is closed on the weekend, so it cannot be your Saturday office at all. For a working session, Monogram’s residential-neighbourhood rooms elsewhere in the city are the right call.

Where it is genuinely excellent is the deliberate tasting visit. Come off-peak, order filter rather than a milk drink, ask what the estate is, and you get the full version of what this company does — in the middle of a business district, which is exactly where you least expect it.

The room

The setting is a large downtown office complex, and the café reads as bright, modern and deliberately energetic rather than cosy. Expect hard surfaces, good light, and the particular acoustic of a lobby-adjacent space: it is not a whisper room, and the sound rises and falls with the building’s own rhythm. Seating exists but is not the point; a large share of orders leave in a cup.

What you gain in exchange for the lack of armchairs is a bar you can watch. In a room this format, the counter is the show — grinders, scales, the pour-over station — and staff have the training to talk you through what is happening if you are interested. It is a far more open bar than the average tower café, where coffee is usually a service rather than a craft.

With your coffee

Food here is a supporting act, not the reason to come. The counter carries pastry and light things to go with a cup, aimed at a business-district clientele that mostly wants something in one hand while the other holds a phone. This is not a brunch destination and does not present itself as one; the sister restaurant attached to another of the company’s cafés is where the group puts its kitchen ambitions.

The retail side is more substantial than the food side. Whole beans from the current line-up are on the shelf, and the subscription service will send them to you ground for whatever you brew at home, which for a downtown café is a smarter use of the space than a bigger pastry case.

When to come

Understand the rhythm of a business tower and you will never queue. The first surge arrives with the start of the office day, and a second comes when meetings break; between them there are genuinely quiet stretches when you can talk to whoever is on bar. The weekend does not exist here — a downtown-core location follows the working week, and that is the single most important thing to know before you set out.

Seasonally, the calendar of a roastery matters too. New harvest arrivals rotate through the filter offer, and the most interesting coffees on the list are, by definition, the ones that will not be there in a few months. If a farm you recognize is on the board, that is the day to order it.

Getting there

The café is inside a major office complex in the heart of Calgary’s downtown business core, on the west side of the centre. In practice most people arrive without ever going outdoors: the building is plugged into the +15 skywalk network, so from a surprising number of downtown towers this is an indoor walk, which matters more than tourists expect in a Calgary February.

By transit it is a short walk from the downtown CTrain stretch that runs free through the core, which makes it reachable from either end of the city without a fare. Driving in is possible but pointless: this is paid tower parking in the densest part of Calgary, and the walk from anywhere else downtown is shorter than the search for a space.

Good to know

The main thing to calibrate is expectation of format. This is not the flagship neighbourhood room with sofas and a weekend crowd; it is a high-performing service bar in a business district, run by a company whose standards do not drop because the address is a tower. Judge it on the cup and the speed, not on whether you can spend three hours there.

Two honest caveats. First, weekend visitors need to go elsewhere in the group — plan around that rather than turning up. Second, the most interesting coffees are often the ones that cannot be scaled, so a filter you loved may simply be finished on your next visit; that is the nature of buying single lots from named farms rather than a year-round blend.

Questions and answers

Does Monogram roast its own coffee?

Yes. It is a roastery that also runs cafés, not a café buying beans from someone else, and the sourcing is done directly with named estates.

Who founded it?

Jeremy Ho, Ben Put and Justin Eyford, in 2014. All three had previously worked at Phil & Sebastian, and they began with a coffee cart they built by hand.

What are all the competition titles about?

The company’s baristas have taken the Canadian Barista Championship ten times between them, and one of the founders placed third at the world championship in 2025.

Is this location open at the weekend?

No. It follows the downtown working week, which is the standard trade-off for a café inside a business tower.

Should I order espresso or filter?

Both are done well, but the filter side is where the more particular single-estate coffees appear. If you want to understand what this roastery actually does, order pour-over.

Can I work here with a laptop?

It is not the right room for it. Seating is limited, turnover is quick, and the weekend closure rules out the classic long working session. The company’s neighbourhood cafés suit that far better.

Is there food?

Pastry and light things to accompany a cup. It is not a brunch or lunch destination, and it does not claim to be.

Can I buy beans to take home?

Yes, whole beans from the current line-up are on the shelf, and there is a subscription with grind settings for drip, French press and Aeropress.

How do I get there in winter?

Through the +15 skywalk network. The building is connected to it, so from much of downtown you can reach the café without stepping outside.

Opening hours