The Barn Café Checkpoint Charlie

The Barn at Checkpoint Charlie, since 2024 in a Werner Düttmann building: a garden, a communal table, coffee from its own roastery.

Ralf Rüller had lived in London for several years when he opened his first specialty coffee café on Auguststraße in 2010. In 2012 he started roasting himself, and today The Barn has around ten cafés in Berlin. In January 2024 a café on Friedrichstraße followed, a stone's throw from Checkpoint Charlie, in a concrete building by Werner Düttmann, who also designed the Akademie der Künste.

The café has different areas: seats at the bar where the hand filters are brewed, high and low tables for working, a round communal table and a view of the garden. In summer you can lie on blankets on the grass in the courtyard. A Berlin carpenter made the wooden elements. The coffee comes from the company's own Berlin roastery, on Voltastraße since the end of 2020. The regular coffees include Genesis from Yirgacheffe in Ethiopia, Atlas from Guatemala and Elemental from Brazil, plus single origins that change with the season. You can take the beans home too.