The Story
Monogram Coffee was founded in Calgary by Ben Put, Justin, and Jeremy — three baristas who had worked together and decided to build something of their own. The first location, in the Altadore neighbourhood, opened in 2014. The roastery followed, and the company has since expanded to four Calgary cafes.
Ben Put is the defining competitive figure in Canadian coffee. He has won the Canadian National Barista Championship seven times — more than any other barista in the country’s history — and has placed in the top five at the World Barista Championship on four separate occasions, including third place in Milan in 2025. That level of sustained excellence at the highest level of competition shapes everything about how Monogram sources, roasts, and presents coffee.
This is not a company built for casual consumption, though it serves that market well. It is, at its core, a craft operation built around the standards required to compete with the world’s best.
Sourcing & Relationships
Monogram’s sourcing is organized around the coffees Ben needs to compete and the relationships required to secure them consistently. That means working with farms that can produce differentiated, high-scoring lots — often Geisha and experimental varieties from Panama, Ethiopia, and Colombia — and returning to those farms annually.
The transparency built into the sourcing program reflects competition norms: every coffee must be traceable, documentable, and defensible on stage at a World Barista Championship. That discipline carries over into what they sell commercially.
Roasting Philosophy
Monogram roasts to accentuate origin character, with profiles that tend toward the lighter end to preserve acidity and aromatic complexity. The filter-forward approach is deliberate: the team believes filter brewing reveals more of what makes a coffee interesting, so that’s where they invest most of their development attention. Espresso offerings follow the same clarity-first logic.
Every roast is evaluated against competition standards, which means the quality floor is unusually high for a retail operation.
What to Try
Their seasonal single-origin filter lots are the main event — these rotate based on what Ben and the team are developing for competition or what’s coming off peak harvest. Coffees from Ethiopia (particularly naturals from Yirgacheffe) and competition-grade Panamanians appear regularly. If you want to understand what top-level Canadian specialty coffee looks like, Monogram is the place to start.