Jackie Tran didn't start out chasing coffee. He was headed toward a design career in San Francisco before a trip through Iceland reoriented everything, a vision of a space that merged coffee, photography, and creative work into one thing. He opened earlier projects in Prague first, Cafefin and Format Coffee, and somewhere in that process realized coffee wasn't about surface-level latte art. It was a discipline deep enough to build a lab around.
That's essentially what Mazelab is. The space itself, tucked into a former car repair shop in Bubeneč, is a genuine feat of adaptive reuse, transformed into a minimalist Scandinavian and Japandi space with an indoor Japanese-style garden and live trees running through it. It reads clinical and considered rather than warm, which tracks with what's actually happening inside it: a working micro-roastery and tasting studio obsessed with extraction to a degree most cafes never approach. Tran finished 6th in the world at the World Brewers Cup, and the team builds its own brewing hardware, including the SOLO dripper, chasing total clarity in the cup.
People were actively cupping new beans when we stopped in.
I've had Mazelab beans well beyond Prague. Dayglow had carried it. I've bought bags of it in their Chicago location. We ran into it again in Istanbul, on the Asian side in Moda. That kind of reach for a roaster this precise says something.
The coffee itself lives up to the reputation. The baristas handle the beans with exactly the care you'd expect from a team this dialed in, and the vast, exacting space matches the precision in the cup. I'll be honest, it didn't feel cozy. There's a lot of room if you want to sit and stay a while, but the space runs cold rather than inviting. The craft carries it anyway.
Mazelab Coffee is a Heavy Hitter, room temperature notwithstanding.
MAZELAB Tasting Studio
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