Slow Coffee Club

Home brewers of Belgrade · Saturdays since 2019

About the club

A table, a kettle, and whoever turns up

The Slow Coffee Club is a non-commercial group of home brewers in Belgrade. We aren’t a café, a shop, a school or a business. We are about a dozen people who like coffee and like each other, and who have met on Saturday mornings, in one form or another, since October 2019.

Our story

Seven years of Saturdays

Home brewers, Saturdays, bring a mug.

— the entire text of the first notice, October 2019

Milica Petrović had been brewing pour-overs in her Dorćol flat for a few years, mostly alone, mostly before work. In the autumn of 2019 she pinned a handwritten card to the noticeboard of Knjižara Ugao, the second-hand bookshop on her corner. Four people turned up the following Saturday. One was her uncle Dragan, who came to make sure she wasn’t being foolish, and who has not missed more than a handful of Saturdays since.

For the first months the club met around Milica’s kitchen table. In 2020 and 2021, when meeting indoors stopped being possible, we brewed the same coffee in our own kitchens on Saturday morning video calls, then on each other’s balconies, then in Tašmajdan park with flasks.

In May 2022 the owner of the bookshop offered us the empty room upstairs for Saturday mornings, asking only for “a cup now and then”. It has a long oak table, a sink, two good windows and a radiator that clanks. We have been there ever since, and the owner gets considerably more than a cup.

Along the way we’ve tasted a few hundred coffees, kept a journal, written down our recipes, and acquired one member who roasts on his balcony, one who bakes for every occasion, and one who is still, quietly, convinced that nothing beats a džezva. He may be right.

Around the table

The regulars

  • Milica Petrović

    Founder · V60 loyalist

    Translator by day. Keeps the kettle, the keys and the peace. Believes the answer to most brewing questions is “grind finer and try again”.

  • Dragan

    Džezva champion, 2025

    Milica’s uncle, retired tram driver, fifty years of domaća kafa every morning. Tolerates filter coffee. Will tell you about his mother’s roaster if you ask, and also if you don’t.

  • Nemanja

    Keeper of spreadsheets

    Civil engineer. Owns the scale, the TDS meter and the count of every meetup since 2019. Thinks about water more than is strictly healthy.

  • Jelena

    Baker in residence

    Pastry cook. Responsible for the cardamom cake, the vanilice and most of the recipes page. Has the best nose at the table and is too modest to say so.

  • Stefan

    Balcony roaster

    Sound engineer. Bought a popcorn machine in 2024 and has not been the same since. Author of the roast log. His neighbour is now a member, by correspondence.

  • Ana

    Reformed sceptic

    Librarian. Joined in the first month to “see what the fuss is about”. Recently identified jasmine, blind, and has been unbearable about it in the nicest way.

  • Teodora

    Challenger

    Architecture student, the youngest regular. Lost the first džezva duel by two points and has been practising ever since. Likes the weird anaerobic coffees nobody else will drink.

  • Luka

    AeroPress, on wheels

    Cycles everywhere with an AeroPress in a tea towel. Winner of the 2023 AeroPress showdown. Former moka-pot tamper, now reformed.

  • Ivana, Vesna & Marko

    The newer regulars

    A pharmacist, a primary-school teacher and a graphic designer, who joined between 2023 and 2025 and now cannot imagine Saturdays without the stairs, the radiator and the smell of the first bloom.

Come along

How to join a Saturday

Anyone is welcome: complete beginners, people with a cupboard full of drippers, people who just like the smell. You don’t need to know anything, own anything, or commit to anything. Come once; come every week.

  1. Write to us by Thursday at hello@slowcoffeeclub.xyz. Just say you’d like to come. We have twelve chairs, so we like to know roughly how many to expect.
  2. We’ll reply with that week’s theme and directions to the room, which is upstairs in a bookshop in Dorćol, a few minutes’ walk from Studentski trg.
  3. Arrive around 9:30. The first brew starts at about 9:45. We finish when the coffee does, usually around noon.
  4. Bring a mug you like, and, if you can, 300 dinars for the bean jar. That’s what pays for the coffee. If you can’t, come anyway — truly.
  5. Optional extras: a hand grinder, a bag of something you’d like the table to taste, or something you baked.

Access: the room is up a flight of 22 stairs and there is no lift. If stairs are a problem, tell us when you write and we’ll set up at the big table on the bookshop’s ground floor instead — the owner has kindly said yes every time.

Questions people ask

Frequently asked

Is it really free?

Yes. The room is lent to us, the equipment is ours, and the beans are paid for by the donation jar. 300 dinars is the suggestion; some people put in more, some less, some bring a bag of coffee instead. Nobody checks.

Do I need any equipment?

None at all. We have three hand grinders, two electric ones, a selection of drippers, two AeroPresses, a French press, three moka pots in different sizes and more džezvas than anyone needs. If you want to buy something for home, ask us on a Saturday and we’ll let you try ours first.

Do you sell coffee or equipment?

No. We’re not a business and we don’t sell anything, including advice. Roasters mentioned on the site are simply places members have bought from. Nobody pays us, and we’d like to keep it that way.

Which grinder should I buy?

We don’t recommend brands, but we’ll tell you what to look for: steel burrs rather than blades, a solid shaft that doesn’t wobble, and enough settings to go from džezva-fine to French-press-coarse. A good hand grinder is a better buy than a cheap electric one. Come and try ours.

Do you meet all year?

Almost. We skip the first Saturday of January, Easter Saturday some years, and run a smaller, sleepier table in August, when half of Belgrade is at the seaside. In July we usually move the meetup outdoors to the river. The front page always shows the next Saturday.

Is the club in Serbian or English?

Both, often in the same sentence. Most of the table is happy in either, and coffee vocabulary is mostly international anyway. Visitors passing through Belgrade are very welcome; several have become pen friends.

I don’t drink caffeine. Is that silly?

Not at all. There’s always a decaf on the table — see the one that fooled Dragan — plus cascara and herbal tea. Tasting doesn’t require finishing the cup, either; we all spit sometimes on big tasting days.

Write to us

The club has one email address, read by Milica on Thursday evenings, usually with a cup of something in hand:

hello@slowcoffeeclub.xyz

Write if you’d like to come on a Saturday, if you have a question about any of the guides, if you’ve tried one of the recipes, or if you just want to tell us about a coffee you loved. We reply to everything, eventually. We don’t have social media accounts, so if you see one using our name, it isn’t us.

Hvala, and see you on Saturday

Privacy note

This site does not know you were here

We wanted a website that behaves like a paper noticeboard. So:

  • No cookies. Not one, not even a “necessary” one. That is why there is no cookie banner.
  • No tracking or analytics. We don’t count visitors, record clicks or use any third-party statistics.
  • Nothing loaded from elsewhere. Every font is one your device already has; every picture is drawn in the page itself. There are no embedded videos, maps, “like” buttons or advertising.
  • No forms and no accounts. The ratio calculator, brew timer and bean filters run entirely in your browser and store nothing; close the tab and they forget you.
  • Email stays email. If you write to us, we use your address only to reply. We don’t keep a mailing list, and we never share addresses with anyone.

Last reviewed by Milica in October 2026. Questions about this note go to the same address as everything else.