Hamburg and Europe’s coffee trade

James Harper:

So Jonathan, back in April we met up in Hamburg, Germany and had a little stroll. Cherry blossoms in bloom, spring is here.

Jonathan Morris:

We did, it was great James. I mean, I love Hamburg. We enjoyed that long walk down to the fish market.

James Harper:

Jonathan, I'm seeing a lot of flags fluttering in the breeze, a lot of masts, a lot of boats of different sizes.

Jonathan Morris:

And a lot of cranes, yeah. Yeah. And we saw a lot of seagulls.

And then sank quite a few beers afterwards. Hi Jonathan, cheers to a beer. It's Hamburg style.

Prost. Prost. Which was excellent.

James Harper:

Coffee plaza. And during one of our walks we stumbled across an unusual sculpture. Oh wow.

Look at that. Okay. It's a giant bean.

That is a giant bean. Oh wow. We were standing at the base of a giant coffee bean made of bronze.

It was like twice the height of us and was covered in text and pictures.

Jonathan Morris:

It reminded me of like, when I first saw it, it was like this is an Aztec sculpture from another planet. What on earth is going on here? Whoa.

Wow.

James Harper:

It was an homage to the coffee industry. It was. And here are all the different types of coffees you can have.

Americano. Caffe Latte, Milchkaffee, Espresso, Bico from Portugal. And they even had my favorite composer of all time.

My favorite part of this, Jonathan, is, you know, I'm a huge fan of Johann Sebastian Bach. They had the first couple of bars of Bach's coffee cantata all written out. Oh, we have the coffee cantata.

We have the coffee cantata. That's incredible. 12 bars of it all written out.

This is terrific. Okay, I'll do the bass. You can do the tenor.

Jonathan Morris:

I don't think that's going to happen. But you can do the whole thing.

James Harper:

Well, I was very disappointed you weren't going to sing.

Jonathan Morris:

Well, I think I might be better off on Espresso Macchiato, actually.

James Harper:

Espresso Macchiato?

Jonathan Morris:

That was in the Eurovision this year. It was one of the great iconic Eurovision songs that only Eurovision could throw up.

Fictional:

Espresso Macchiato, Macchiato, Macchiato, por favor.

Jonathan Morris:

That song will be on the bean in a couple of years. I, do you know, you're dead right it will. So, James, you know, this bean reflects the fact that coffee has changed Hamburg.

Here's a stat for you. One in three of all the cups of coffee drunk in Europe, the beans in that cup have passed through Hamburg. Wow.

One in three. That's a lot of coffee. That is a hell of a lot of coffee.

And that enormous amount of coffee coming through the city, flowing through it, molds it into becoming a whole city serving the coffee industry. That's the story we're covering in the first half of this episode. How coffee changes one of Europe's biggest, most important port cities, Hamburg, the port for Germany.

And coffee plays such an important role here in Hamburg.

James Harper:

They even built a shrine to coffee, the mythical Hamburg Coffee Exchange. And in us coming to Hamburg, Jonathan, we went on a pilgrimage to try to find it.

Jonathan Morris:

We absolutely did, James. But, you know, the story doesn't stop there, because once coffee has shaped Hamburg, the story flips around. Because what I see now is the way in which Hamburg has then shaped the world of coffee.

If you walk into any specialty coffee cafe around the world, you're probably going to find a piece of Hamburg there.

James Harper:

Yes, because our partner sponsor for this series is Malkoenig, manufacturers of coffee grinders. And they, I had quoted here, in Hamburg. I'm James Harper, creator of the Filter Stories documentary podcast.

And I'm Jonathan Morris, professional historian and author of the book Coffee, A Global History. And this is series three of A History of Coffee, the story of how a psychoactive seed changed the world and continues to shape our lives today.

Jonathan Morris:

And in this episode, we're looking at the story of how coffee changed the city of Hamburg and how Hamburg changed the story of coffee. So, James, I think if you want to understand why Hamburg is so important in the history of coffee in Europe, really, the easiest way to do it is to think about its geography within Europe. Because if you want to get coffee, right, relatively quickly and easily to essentially Central and Eastern Europe, so Berlin, Prague, Poland, right, you've got one load of coffee.

Where's the best place to dump that coffee? Right, well, let's look at a map.

James Harper:

I'm a ship, I've come from a tropical part of the world. Yeah. You go probably between France and the UK, right, on the English Channel.

The English Channel, yeah. And then you hit a wall. It's a massive thing getting in the way of getting your coffee into Central Europe.

That's a nice way of talking about Denmark. It's like a big like hand, you know, outstretched palm saying stop. And if you really want to take it by sea, you have to go all the way up Denmark and then all the way down through like booby traps, all these little like islands of shallow seas and like rocky outcrops to try to get it somewhere into the Baltic Sea.

It's treacherous. Yeah, to say the least. But on the map, like underneath Denmark, like there's this giant slither of water.

It goes really far down into Germany.

Jonathan Morris:

Yeah.

James Harper:

There, underneath Denmark is Hamburg.

Jonathan Morris:

Exactly. On the Elbe, right? The Elbe River.

Yeah. And so that is exactly where you're going to take your coffee ship.

James Harper:

Is that a boat? And we saw it for ourselves on a lovely romantic evening cruise. So here we are on this romantic river cruise, our three-year-old river cruise.

Yeah.

Jonathan Morris:

I think it was the equivalent of the river bus, let's be honest.

James Harper:

It was the river bus. That's what it was. What aromas are we getting here by the industrial docks?

Jonathan Morris:

Oh, well, I'd say a touch of petrol vapor, wouldn't you?

James Harper:

But what really stuck out to me anyway was just how wide the Elbe is. Yeah. I just noticed that there's not just one container ship.

No, there are actually lined up. Two container ships lined up. This river is so wide, it can fit many, many container ships.

So I get it, right? So geographically speaking, like Hamburg is just perfect, right? Really, really wide river underneath Denmark.

And, you know, you get your goods into Hamburg and then from there it can go into central Europe through canals and railroads and roads and everything else.

Jonathan Morris:

Yeah, that's right. But, and this is why I think it's such an interesting city, there is a whole other reason why Hamburg is so central to this story and why you want to take your ship to Hamburg. It's really about a word.

And it's a word that is actually, I've realized, of course, the current US president's favorite word. Oh, dear. Tariffs.

Or rather what it's about is no tariffs. No tariffs. No tariffs.

Because Hamburg has been a free port for about a thousand years. A free port, no tariffs.

James Harper:

Help me understand this, right? So give me an example. Let's say we're in the era before coffee.

We're back in medieval times, you know, the 1300s, 1400s. How does being a free port work?

Jonathan Morris:

So at that time you were probably bringing in sort of wool, textiles, things like that. But also it became sort of very dominant for some weird stuff. Whale blubber, for example.

Poor whales. Poor whales. Hamburg has got great skills in whale blubber manipulation.

I'm not a great expert on whales, which you'll probably be pleased to know. But the point of that is then, so imagine this thing, right? You bring in your whale.

You work the whale. You can then, in effect, sell the whale product on. You haven't paid to bring it in, but you sell it on.

And they effectively, your customers who then import that from you, they have to pay the duty. You didn't have to pay a previous duty.

James Harper:

So Hamburg's special because if your whale blubber would go into any other place, you pay a duty to get the whale blubber into the port. That's a cost. Then you process whale blubber, you put it into smaller packages, and then you send it again.

And then, you know, as it goes to another territory, you pay a second duty. But Hamburg, being a free port, the whale blubber comes in. You don't put a duty on it.

Correct. So it's cheaper. And then the duty is only paid when it gets, you know, shipped off again to another place.

Exactly. Got it. Okay.

So Hamburg is, well, we can tell why it became such like a shipping focused place. Absolutely. Because amazing geography, right?

Right on the Denmark. Yeah. Very wide river taking it there.

And this really special tax arrangement. That's right. Cool.

Hamburg, it's here. Yeah. We've got tax benefits, has amazing geography.

So where does the story of coffee begin with Hamburg? Because I know that coffee doesn't enter the story until around the 1500s.

Jonathan Morris:

So we've got this coffee, it's coming into Hamburg. In fact, there's some nice things about the Hamburg merchant class who used to apparently sit out on the terrace of coffee houses watching their ships come into the port.

James Harper:

What an image. And we're talking beautiful ships, you know, those kind of big sailing ships back in the day, right?

Jonathan Morris:

Yeah, absolutely. Huge masts. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Huge masts. Imagine hundreds of those things. Three masts, multiple levels of deck, as wide as like a city block.

Exactly. Yeah, yeah. So you'd be looking at a huge mastage traffic jam, basically, you know.

But anyway, these guys sitting there drinking their coffee, enjoying watching their boats come in. Okay, so the coffee's coming in on these beautiful wooden ships. Where's it coming from?

And who's drinking it? Who's drinking it in the first place is obviously the kind of the nobility, the upper classes. Coffee begins to be popular very quickly in Hamburg.

And it's a fascinating story because what happens is as the Germans begin to want to drink coffee, so those upper classes, the nobility, are trying to stop them drink coffee. Coffee, in part, is really supposed to be something that is only for those upper classes. Partly to save on exchange.

Right. They didn't want to trade away their precious gold coins in exchange for coffee. But also just to keep social distinction.

So the king, the monarchy, actually employed people to walk around on the streets and smell, these are the coffee sniffers that they're called, to smell if there's any coffee roasting going on. Nuts. And then, of course, if there is, they confiscate those beans.

Right. Because people were roasting these in their homes. This is the whole point is that, you know, coffee demand is just too great.

So then the king throws on a coffee tax. So, you know, the government has moved from trying to ban it to now just trying to extract the maximum value from it, really. Yeah, this is a really fascinating story.

James Harper:

And actually, I've written an article in the coffee magazine, Standout, about Frederick the Great of Prussia and how his coffee tax still haunts me and everybody else who drinks coffee in Germany. Frederick the Great is a fascinating character. Everybody loves him and hates him at the same time.

If you want to read that article, there's a link to Standout in the show notes. So, Jonathan, what happens after the nobility fails to ban coffee?

Jonathan Morris:

To cut to the chase here, by the 1900s, the stat we have for coffee consumption in Germany per capita is the highest in Europe. 3.3 kilos of coffee per capita. That's a lot of coffee, particularly for the 1900s.

So Germany, with Hamburg in the forefront, basically becomes the European coffee capital in this point.

James Harper:

Wow, so 130 years ago, Germans are the biggest coffee consumers in Europe.

Jonathan Morris:

Correct. It's damned impressive. It's a lot, a lot of coffee.

James Harper:

But it turns out across Europe and even in Germany, there were loads of other places, other ports, that Germany could have used to bring coffee into the country. But Hamburg eventually wipes the floor and takes the lion's share of the trade. Coming up next, we explore what else a city needs to have, beyond geography and a nice tax arrangement, to become the importing destination for a continent.

So here we have a situation where at 1900, on the nose, the German coffee market seems to be exploding. A lot of Germans are drinking coffee. We have the Industrial Revolution in full swing here.

We have steam technology coming through. A lot of factories, people drinking it all over the place. Let's drag it back to Hamburg.

Hamburg wasn't the only port that had a lot of coffee coming through. And to help us understand this period of history deeper, we were actually joined in Hamburg by your friend Jonathan, a German historian.

Margrit Schulte-Bierbühl:

My name is Margrit Schulte-Bierbühl. I'm a professor of history at the University of Düsseldorf.

Jonathan Morris:

I usually introduce her by saying Margrit is to chocolate what I am to coffee, because she's an absolute expert on chocolate. But of course, being Margrit, she also knows her coffee.

James Harper:

And so regarding the trading situation within Germany, Margrit mentioned there were many ports competing for Hamburg's trade.

Margrit Schulte-Bierbühl:

Before the 1880s, the Germans got coffee along the Rhine from the Netherlands. In Frankfurt, they received the coffee from France. And in the south of Germany, as well as Italy.

And so they got it from Trieste.

James Harper:

But Hamburg eventually takes the trade, becomes the place for coffee imports. How does that happen?

Jonathan Morris:

Okay, so this is an interesting story, James, because it's also how Hamburg development interacts with political developments in Germany. So as we said, Hamburg is a city-state. Remember, Germany doesn't get unified until the 1860s.

We have to understand what we mean by Germany before the 1860s, because there is no Germany. Germany at that point is really just a collection of hundreds of little kingdoms.

Margrit Schulte-Bierbühl:

There were more than 500 small duchies and bishoprics.

James Harper:

Does that explain why there are so many castles in Germany?

Margrit Schulte-Bierbühl:

Yeah, it certainly does.

James Harper:

Hey, everybody needs a castle, right? 500 castles at least.

Jonathan Morris:

The only thing that sort of holds them together is the fact that they're speaking German. And then, James, during the 1860s, suddenly Germany is rapidly uniting all these states. All these micro-states are coming together very quickly to form a modern German state.

Let's test your historical knowledge. Who kind of is the father of German unification? Who's the big figure?

Well, let me tell you. He has amazing mutton chops. Bismarck.

Otto van Bismarck. Exactly. Otto van Bismarck, the great Prussian chancellor.

Before German unification, Prussia is this expanding state in the north of Germany. Its capital is actually where Berlin is today.

Otto von Bismarck:

My home.

Jonathan Morris:

And under Bismarck's chancellorship, it goes on to unify all the other small kingdoms around it. Okay, so the question for Hamburg. Hamburg has been doing well as a little city-state.

But what does it do when suddenly, instead of having lots of little city-states and micro-duchies, et cetera, around it, it has one big state to deal with? And the answer is, Hamburg decides it makes sense for it to jump into Germany, jump into this unification process. And actually, at the beginning, that's really great for Hamburg, because it remains acting as a free port for this new state, which now gives it access to a huge German market.

Right, enormous. Then, in the 1870s, culminating in 1879, Bismarck changes course. Bismarck has been pretty much a standard liberal free trader.

Okay. But he converts in the 1870s to wanting to introduce tariffs to protect infant German industry. So suddenly, Hamburg is in big trouble, right?

Right. How can it be a free port in a country that is now committed to high tariff barriers?

James Harper:

I mean, what is the point of Hamburg if it can't profit from that juicy, juicy, lucrative tax arrangement, where it doesn't pay for tariffs? It doesn't have tariffs. It's the whole point of Hamburg.

Jonathan Morris:

This goes to extensive negotiation. And what happens is that a much reduced, but potentially still available free port is allowed.

James Harper:

Okay.

Jonathan Morris:

So Hamburg has to build it.

James Harper:

Okay.

Jonathan Morris:

What they build is what we call the Speicherstadt, the warehouse city. It's one of the most efficient transportation hubs in the world at that point. I mean, this is the 1880s.

It's absolutely pioneering. It's so systematic. It's incredibly efficient.

It's very, dare I say, German. Or what Germany used to be. Until they allowed you in, yeah.

Yes, quite.

James Harper:

You know, Jonathan, what's really cool is that when we were there, you know, today, you can still see the Speicherstadt, the warehouse city that was built back in the 1880s. We went to the Speicherstadt Museum and we could see how this warehouse city actually worked. Oh, this is so cool.

Look at all this stuff. It was really hammered home when we saw this map in the Speicherstadt Museum, which showed you all the railway lines, the road lines, the waterways that connect into Hamburg. So you have water to the warehouse and then look at these train lines, like veins sneaking into every bit of the hand of these ports.

It's a good point, yeah. It was like I was in an anatomy class. There were so many veins, like transport links, making their way into the fingers of the Speicherstadt and the docks.

Extremely efficient logistics hub.

Otto von Bismarck:

Yeah.

James Harper:

Let's run through an example of goods coming into Hamburg and how they would go through the Speicherstadt. Let's say big ship loaded with coffee sails down the wide Elbe River into Hamburg. What happens?

Jonathan Morris:

So, okay, James, we're bringing your big ship in. Most of the coffee taken out of that ship will be stored on warehouses on the other side of the river. But then bit by bit, it will be brought into the Speicherstadt.

So it comes in on these barges and they kind of come into those man-made, sort of long, thin man-made islands with these big five-story red brick buildings running along the waterline. On one side of them, of course, is the water, you know, for the barges that ship in the goods. On the other side, there are road and rail links.

And the goods basically then go through those buildings. We've seen the pictures, haven't we, James, of people hauling up the coffee sacks to the tops of the buildings. You know what it's like, James?

It's like an open pallet floor, isn't it? With no side whatsoever. I mean, you've got to keep that very level not to have a big problem.

Margrit Schulte-Bierbühl:

And these sacks could fall down.

Jonathan Morris:

And then the coffee will be sorted, it will be graded, it will be divided into where it's going. And then once it's all ready, out it goes from the other side onto the road and rail links that will take it into Germany. Or alternatively, if it's going to be re-exported, shipped out of Hamburg without ever paying any tariff.

James Harper:

So what we have here is this extremely efficient infrastructure. Which, when you add it to the fact that Hamburg, geographically, located under Denmark, right, so just perfect for being an importing destination. And then of course at the tax haven, and then you add the Speicherstadt on top, like this efficient transportation hub, like it's a no-brainer.

Of course Hamburg was going to become the importing place in Germany by the end of the 19th century.

Jonathan Morris:

Absolutely. And basically this becomes the heart of trading coffee in Europe, right? Which more so means that the finance is in Hamburg, which means that the deals are being cut in Hamburg and they're all relating to bits of coffee held around Hamburg.

James Harper:

Right. And Jonathan, you know, I think there is no better symbol of just how important Hamburg is in the coffee trade globally than the mythical church-like structure that was built for coffee. The Hamburg Coffee Exchange.

Jonathan Morris:

Church is right, James, because I mean if you were to go in, it would look like a church, yeah? It's got those very tall ceilings, intricately carved wooden counters, ornate chandeliers, and of course stained glass windows. Wow.

James Harper:

And we tried to find it. Yeah, I think the coffee exchange is around the corner. Let's go have a look.

We spent a good hour or so, two hours, you know, just knocking around to Speicherstadt trying to find the exchange. Exactly. If you were a stained glass window, where would you go?

Where would you go? We're looking up at every window of every building trying to find those legendary stained glass windows. Should we just walk around the edge and just check they're not facing out anywhere?

And we thought we got pretty close when we turned a corner into this beautiful courtyard. Which is really rather nice. And even smelled some roasted coffee.

Yeah. I smell coffee roasting. Oh yes, that's definitely coffee roasting.

But no, it was just a coffee trader's sample room. Uh, that's totally wrong. All right, let's go back, take a right.

Oh god.

Jonathan Morris:

But in the end, no luck. Couldn't find them. No, and as we eventually realized, James, there was an obvious reason for that, which was that it was actually destroyed during the Second World War.

But in a sense, that kind of symbolized some of the difficulty that Hamburg went through during that era from the First World War up to the end of the Second World War. First of all, we have Germany, of course, immediately after the war has to pay reparations. The loser of the war pays reparations to the other countries.

Then comes that kind of famous hyperinflation in the 20s. And then comes the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. So of course, Hitler drags Germany into World War.

And not only does Hamburg cease to be the focus of the coffee global trade during this period, it's the focus, of course, of the Allied bombs during this period, being a, you know, very much the port city that we're so reliant on. It's only really once the war is over, Germany's been divided into East and West. Hamburg is obviously in West Germany.

And they actually began to try to revive the coffee exchange and built a new one.

James Harper:

And we also tried to find that new exchange that was built in the 50s. We again walked around and looked at Google Maps and we couldn't find it.

Jonathan Morris:

We couldn't find it and it was so annoying because you and I were both convinced by all these stories and you were reading the guidebooks of the time that it had beautiful stained glass windows and it was a whole temple to coffee and it was a whole, I mean it was supposed to be a symbol of the rebirth of Hamburg and you know the centrality of coffee to that.

James Harper:

Right, but we struggled to find it because it's not operational today.

Jonathan Morris:

You're right James, that coffee exchange opens and closes within a few years.

James Harper:

And you know, Jonathan, from my perspective, today, you know, of course historically coffee had a huge role in Hamburg. It led to the creation of the Speicherstadt, if nothing else, a crown jewel in the trading warehouses of Europe. But to be frank, what I saw when we were there in Hamburg was so disappointing.

It wasn't Hamburg as the center of coffee at all because look, the new coffee exchange that opened in the 50s, spent a whole afternoon looking around and couldn't find it. The Speicherstadt itself, so much of it was bombed and the buildings that survived, Magritte told me, from the 50s onwards they were all falling to disrepair and decay. Buildings that had just rotten.

And actually it got so bad that in the 90s many of them were rebuilt for us tourists.

Margrit Schulte-Bierbühl:

Even some of these old buildings were restored to some extent.

James Harper:

So this is all a bit of a historical recreation just for us.

Margrit Schulte-Bierbühl:

Yeah, just for the tourists.

James Harper:

And on top of that, okay, it's being rebuilt and it's just dead. It's like you're walking through the downtown of like a mid-sized American city in the sense that it's full of cars. So many of the beautiful old Speicherstadt buildings have been gutted to turn into multi-story car parks and it's completely soulless.

In what way can Hamburg be a center of coffee anymore?

Jonathan Morris:

Well James, it can be the center of the coffee trade because the coffee trade does return to Hamburg after World War II in particularly the 1960s because Hamburg is very, very swift to get into the big great shipping logistics revolution. Which is what James? Containers.

Containers, exactly. Hamburg develops itself as a container port and that means that once again combining its container port status and its freeport status, it is able to reposition itself at the heart of coffee.

James Harper:

It's interesting, you know, if you go on Google Maps actually there's a space underneath Hamburg on the other side of the river which is much bigger than Hamburg itself and it's just full of containers, nothing else.

Jonathan Morris:

But you know what it means is we don't need the Speicherstadt. Those buildings, those beautiful red brick buildings are redundant. The Speicherstadt is replaced by the container docks and the coffee exchange, well it's all digitized these days, huh?

You don't need people in a space anymore trading coffee, it's all done on computers.

James Harper:

Where's the romance though, Jonathan? Where's the romance? And now, coming up next, we explore.

Yes, of course, coffee has shaped Hamburg. But how has Hamburg shaped the global coffee world? So we've seen how coffee was integral to the shape of Hamburg with the Speicherstadt.

It becoming this major coffee importing center and even today coffee is massively important to Hamburg. Things have digitized, you know, so the Speicherstadt's not what it was, fine, fine, fine. But still coffee has left its mark in a massive way in Hamburg and maybe that massive bronze bean being like the perfect symbol.

Okay, but what about the question how has Hamburg shaped coffee? Because frankly most of the story up until now has been the story of coffee shaping Hamburg but not really the other way around. How exactly did Hamburg shape the global story of coffee?

Jonathan Morris:

So James, have a look at just the huge major global coffee companies that are now actually based in Hamburg. There are a lot. Go on.

NKG, Nomencafe group, they are the importers. They now have about 8.5% of global trade, global coffee, you know, all coffee beans. That's crazy.

All coffee beans in the world, you know, 8.5% of them owned by these guys. Huge. They've got 14 million sacks plus of coffee.

It's just inconceivable, yeah.

James Harper:

And that bean we saw was outside their headquarters in the Speicherstadt of Hamburg. In the Speicherstadt. And like Nomen's operations around the world are enormous.

They have so many different subsidiaries in like so many different countries.

Jonathan Morris:

You know, you've got 60 companies across 20 countries, all headquartered in Hamburg. Then you've got a company post Second World War, Chibo, right? Chibo, it begins as this sort of mail order coffee company.

That's what its origins are. Today it has about 550 stores in Germany. It's got about 350 outside Germany.

It's merged with what was its big rival, Duxue. It's like, you know, a huge roaster in the world. Also headquartered in Hamburg.

Also headquartered in Hamburg.

James Harper:

And of course, Jonathan, we're missing out another very big company in the world of coffee that's headquartered in Hamburg. We are indeed.

Jonathan Morris:

Has a wonderful German name, Malkoenig. Malkoenig, the king of grinders. We went to Malkoenig and we spoke with Sven.

Ansgar Bitz:

I'm Sven Röhricke. I'm for eight years now a business development manager here at Hemrow.

James Harper:

And Sven was like the perfect person for us to talk to, because he's taken it upon himself to become the company's in-house historian.

Sven Röhricke:

Four years ago, I started to do some research on our corporate history.

Jonathan Morris:

James, I think it's really interesting looking at the history of Malkoenig. Mm-hmm. Because the company itself is now 100 years old.

Its history gives us a fantastic view of how Hamburg shaped originally the German coffee market through the grinders that it manufactured, how the Germans were drinking coffee, and then how this becomes an international story through which ultimately Hamburg, through Malkoenig, very much is shaping the global world of coffee.

James Harper:

Huh. Okay. All right.

Well, let's see that story then. Let's pick it up from after World War II.

Sven Röhricke:

It's the 1950s. Here you can see four different grinders from different decades.

James Harper:

Sven had found four gorgeous grinders, and they basically looked like very early versions of the EK shop grinder. Yeah. You know, the modern EK we see in cafes everywhere.

It's iconic, a very bold design. It is a thumpy big thing, right? I mean, this is a serious piece of cake.

But those EK shop grinders of old, they are much more ornate, flowery.

Sven Röhricke:

Yeah, yeah.

James Harper:

With a very beautiful design. Trying to describe these in audio is near impossible, so link in the show notes to our Instagram, where you can see them for yourself. So Jonathan, okay.

So here we have these beautiful flowery versions of the EK. What does that tell us about the sort of coffees Germany was drinking in the 1950s, 60s, 70s? The clue is in the name.

Einphasen Kaffeemühle. Look, as a bit of a science nerd, that was amazing to learn from you.

Jonathan Morris:

No way! There we go, the EK. So that's what EK stands for.

Wow.

James Harper:

EK is an acronym for Einphasen Kaffeemühle. Yeah, and that translates to a one-phase coffee grinder. As Ansgar, one of my clinic's product managers, explained to us, what it means is that you can plug this grinder into any domestic plug socket and it's going to work.

Sven Röhricke:

So that means it's made for one-phase power supply. You can use it with a normal power socket.

Jonathan Morris:

Because these grinders are just being used in grocery stores, yeah? They're being used on the everyday electricity supply. So these are not specialist goods for factories.

They're not specialist goods for industrial prices. And of course, we don't have things like supermarkets. These are used in small mom-and-pop shops to grind the coffee for the customer when the customer comes in.

Got it. Now Sven tells us that Marconi grinders were mostly used for coffee.

Ansgar Bitz:

Basic product was always a coffee grinder. But they could also be used for other things too. Poppy seed spices.

Cutting cheese. Coffee on the one side, cheese on the other.

James Harper:

And Jonathan, you know, it also makes sense to me why these grinders, you know, are so beautiful, so elaborately designed. This is a retail space where you have to entice your customers with beautiful things. You've got to have a beautiful grinder in your beautiful store.

Jonathan Morris:

You're absolutely right. You've got to have that beautiful grinder in a store. But then we see things starting to shift because the way that Germans are drinking their coffee is shifting.

Jonathan Morris:

Yeah.

Jonathan Morris:

And we see that very clearly with the development of another kind of grinder that Marconi began to manufacture, the so-called DK.

Sven Röhricke:

We have also our industrial grinders called DK. Well, DK stands for Dreiphasen. So three-phase coffee grinder.

So for these bigger grinders, these industrial grinders, you need this special plug with three phases. Right. So this is a grinder.

James Harper:

It's designed for an industrial factory setting because it's so large. It needs its own very special three-phase electricity adapter. You very rarely find those in retail stores or people's homes.

And Jonathan, we were actually lucky enough to see a DK grinder for ourselves when Ansgar gave us a factory tour.

Sven Röhricke:

Here, for example, you see our industrial grinder called DK 27. The DK.

James Harper:

And it was amazing because they're so big, like a huge EK. The burrs themselves, you know, the metal discs that actually do the grinding. I've never seen a burr so big.

Enormous.

Sven Röhricke:

Yeah. Like as big as a dinner plate. Yeah.

That's like a discus size. Yeah. Yeah.

With these burrs, you can grind up to 400 kilograms per hour.

James Harper:

If Donkey Kong owned a grinder, this is the grinder he would own. Well, obviously it would be a DK. This is the Donkey Kong.

This is the big one. Now look, it's huge. It's much bigger than the others.

Donkey Kong is not a small character.

Jonathan Morris:

This is an industrial grinder. It's being manufactured to sit in an industrial context. It's going to grind coffees at industrial scale, industrial level.

So this is Malkoenig responding to a big shift, actually, in how coffee is bought and consumed and how the market gets that coffee to the consumer. Margriet explains this to us.

Margrit Schulte-Bierbühl:

In the 1960s, supermarkets emerged and they were a huge success. You know, today there are hardly any other shops, small shops, unless they are in small villages. And even they can hardly survive the competition with the supermarkets.

Jonathan Morris:

In this new world, this new retail world, coffee is then ground up in the roasting plant itself, right? In big, big quantities. So you need your DK, you put it in millions of bags, and off it goes to consumers to pick off the supermarket shelves across the country.

Right. So that's supermarket coffee.

James Harper:

We also then saw in the Malkoenig factory, another way in which Germans began drinking their coffee, and that's in bakeries.

Ansgar Bitz:

Bakeries in Germany are probably the most important outlets for coffee. Where the coffees would be made on a super automatic espresso machine.

James Harper:

And Malkoenig actually manufactures the burrs that go inside super automatics as well. So we saw a whole bunch of them and that becomes, and still is, a massive way in which Germans drink their coffee. But then that gets dwarfed by the rise of espresso.

Sven Röhricke:

And now we will enter our burr production. Here we go.

James Harper:

Malkoenig these days manufactures mostly burrs for espresso grinders. These are the grinders that sit next to espresso machines.

Sven Röhricke:

This is the base plate and here you see the portafilter fork with the portafilter support.

Jonathan Morris:

Up until now then, this was essentially a German story. But with the rise of specialty, the spread internationally of specialty coffee culture, this becomes a global story. Malkoenig becomes an export orientated company.

And of course nothing exemplifies that better than the key moment of the story of the EK43, the most iconic grinder and Matt Perger. James, you tell us the story of what happened with Matt Perger because you were there, I believe. Well, I was certainly alive for once.

James Harper:

So the story is around 15 years ago, Matt Perger, he's a barista in a specialty coffee cafe in Melbourne, Australia.

Matt Perger:

Hi, my name is Matthew Perger. I'm from Saint Ali and Sensory Lab in Melbourne. I've been a barista for six or seven years now.

James Harper:

In his cafe, he had an EK43. This grinder would only be used when a customer picked up a bag of beans and was like, hey, can you grind this for me for home? It was not used for anything else.

And certainly not for espresso. It wasn't designed for espresso.

Sven Röhricke:

This grinder was made for filter coffee grinding, for shop grinding.

James Harper:

But then one day, Matt decides to grind some coffee for espresso in the EK. And lo and behold, it tasted amazing. And he incorporates this into a world barista championship routine.

Barista competition commentator:

Yeah, Matthew has introduced a whole new paradigm to the barista competitions with this routine. He's grinding on an unusual grinder. You've got this gigantic grinder here.

Tell us about it.

Matt Perger:

So that's a grinder that no one really uses for espresso. It's called a filter coffee grinder. Espresso grinders are traditionally designed to produce really large and really small particles that block the flow of the espresso machine and give you a 30-second shot.

But this one is designed to produce an extremely even particle size.

James Harper:

And on the back of his performance, showing the EK being used for espresso, the specialty coffee world goes gangbusters for the EK because the coffee grounds themselves are very uniform in size, which can help you get very specific, pleasurable flavor profiles. If you, dear listener, want to note out more on this, you can listen to an entire episode I made about grind distribution curves and their effects on flavor.

Jonathan Morris:

Link in the show notes. So, James, this is the point I wanted to make, yeah? The EK, it's now everywhere around the world, yeah?

It's symbolic of specialty coffee. Every specialty coffee bar has an EK. We go in, we see the shape.

The EK, it's from Hamburg. It's from Malkoenig. It's designed in Hamburg.

It's a product of Hamburg. It's developed in Hamburg. And Hamburg itself is a product of coffee.

Coffee developing the city. And now we have Hamburg exporting its coffee culture to the world via Malkoenig and via all those other companies that we also mentioned previously.

James Harper:

And Jonathan, let's take the story right up to the present day. The most recent thing that Malkoenig launched that I thought was super cool is a grinder which talks to the espresso machine. And so, for example, if the espresso is running too fast, it tells the grinder that, and then the grinder adjusts the grind setting automatically.

And the idea here is that it just makes the barista's life so much easier. They don't have to focus on adjusting the grind setting all the time because it's all done automatically. But I wanted to see whether it could survive the biggest test of all.

This is you kind of going in cold, Jonathan, into a machine and a grinder, a cafe-level professional set up here. Would this machine work? Would the grinder be adjusted correctly when used by someone who had never worked in a cafe before?

You, Jonathan.

Jonathan Morris:

Let's see if I can remember which way to take the portafilter out. And let's hope. Good.

So what I did is pull a shot of espresso. First, I just put the portafilter into the grinder. It gives me the exact amount of coffee.

Nice. Well, 19 grams, Jonathan, on the nose. 19 grams on the nose.

See, you didn't think I...

Sven Röhricke:

How did you manage that?

Jonathan Morris:

I don't know.

Sven Röhricke:

Using a load cell, it's very simple.

Jonathan Morris:

Yeah, right. It gives you always the right amount out of it. Then I locked it into the espresso machine, pulled a shot of coffee.

James Harper:

In we go.

Jonathan Morris:

In we go. Portafilter locked in. Portafilter locked.

I'm going to sit back and watch the perfect espresso that I'm going to produce for you. And it was coming out too fast.

Sven Röhricke:

It is maybe now a little bit too fast. So the grinder will now automatically adjust the grind size a little bit finer.

Jonathan Morris:

So then what happens, yeah, is the grinder automatically adjusted the grind so that next time the espresso would flow out at the correct speed.

James Harper:

Jonathan, you just adjusted the grinder by making a coffee. Hey, told you I was good. By like telekinesis, you have changed this grinder.

Jonathan Morris:

The only thing that's surprising me here, James, is that you're still on your feet, not having fallen over in shock that I've managed to do that.

James Harper:

So Jonathan, that's the episode. Coffee shaped Hamburg and then Hamburg shaped the coffee world. And our episode could end right now.

I want to mention one last thing that happened to us just before we left Hamburg, literally hours before we were due to catch our trains. You, myself and Magritte, we were in the Spackerstadt Museum and then we got a tip off.

Sven Röhricke:

There was the coffee exchange. Here we have the hall of the coffee exchange.

Jonathan Morris:

We finally got a tip off about the exchange, the rebuilt coffee exchange. We've got one hour with our tip off.

James Harper:

So what the museum director told us is that the coffee exchange is now actually part of a hotel and it was just down the road.

Jonathan Morris:

That's right.

James Harper:

And we got to the hotel and the lobby is full of ships and the kind of like trading port memorabilia. Yeah.

Margrit Schulte-Bierbühl:

It's a cannon boat from 1903.

James Harper:

But then we went up some stairs, followed a couple of signs. The Bursensaal. We went over the canal.

Guys, we're going to go across the bridge. A bridge covered walkway that's owned by the hotel. Yeah.

Look at this. We're like over the water on a bridge connecting these two buildings. Wow.

And there on our right, we found the coffee exchange. And there it is, the Café Bursa. With like 1950s stylings on the doors.

Jonathan Morris:

Wow. All right. We found the coffee exchange.

Wow. I'm okay. Blown away by this.

Blown away by it. Which is basically being used as a function room, right?

James Harper:

It's a function room.

Jonathan Morris:

I mean, that's really what it is. It's a function room.

James Harper:

But it's always been like frozen in time as a result.

Jonathan Morris:

It is absolutely frozen in time. It's just stunning. Crazy.

But it was just wonderful. This is like the wow moment. This is the wow moment.

This is the wow moment.

James Harper:

Charles, look at the clocks. Look at the clocks.

Jonathan Morris:

We have Hamburg, New York, and Rio. Oh my goodness me.

James Harper:

The three most important time centers for coffee here. Brazil, New York, and Hamburg. That's nuts.

And we finally saw the stained glass windows.

Jonathan Morris:

Absolutely.

James Harper:

It was brilliant. We're on what seems to me a Brazilian coffee plantation, given the geography. Very flat terrain.

Yeah, yeah. And the coffee hedging. Yes, and perfectly symmetrical rows all the way into the distance.

And we have pickers left and right of people who are clearly not Europeans, not white, picking the coffee, dumping it into a big pile of red cherries in the center.

Jonathan Morris:

Every cherry is red.

James Harper:

You could feel the ghosts of the coffee traders of old doing their work in this room. Also, notice this. Look at the beautiful light just streaming right in.

It's like half the room is just bathed in tall, gorgeous windows of light.

Jonathan Morris:

Yeah.

James Harper:

Would have been a lovely place to work on a sunny day.

Jonathan Morris:

Yeah, absolutely.

James Harper:

Then there's a balcony. You can go outside, smoke your cigarette, of course, discuss the latest movement in the coffee price.

Jonathan Morris:

Yeah. Wow. Should imagine quite a lot of that happened, actually.

Yeah. And even the more nostalgic for the fact that this was the rebuilt exchange, that hardly ever saw any trade. Yeah, it's pretty overwhelming.

And it's like walking into a bit of a time capsule. It really is. You know, and a particularly weird time capsule, because it's like, it's not like, OK, this is a really ancient building.

It's like this was a modern building in which they moved the institution. Then kaboomf, the lights went off. But the great thing there, James, is OK, the exchange no longer functioning.

But Hamburg, my God, it's functioning. It's functioning. Hamburg continues to be such a big coffee place.

James Harper:

Look at that. The Hamburger Café Tidmin Market.

Jonathan Morris:

This is incredible.

James Harper:

There it is. That's the actual ledger where they put the prices in. Oh, my God.

Strictly soft. Good to large bean. Good to fine roast.

Good cup. Basis, prime Santos. Wow.

Come to our Instagrams, mine at filterstoriespodcast, Jonathan's at coffeehistoryjm, to see this coffee exchange for yourself.

Jonathan Morris:

What a wonderful place. What a wonderful thing to see and to just kind of finish our work in Hamburg there. It was just quite remarkable.

Marguerite, we left on a high.

Margrit Schulte-Bierbühl:

Well, really nice to meet you again.

Jonathan Morris:

Marguerite produced a book called Café ist fertig with contributions from many people, and Marguerite edits it. And it is a fantastic guide to all kinds of things about coffee in Germany and its history. Look in the shadows.

We found a hidden treasure. We really did. Yeah.

I'm thinking someone will come in and throw us out because it's all been a dream, James. It's a fever dream. Thanks for listening.

So, Jonathan, what's coming up in the next episode? In the next episode, James, we are going back to see what we can find out about the origins and indeed the prehistory of coffee in Ethiopia.

James Harper:

And can we use that story to pay more to the communities who live in and around those wild coffee forests in Ethiopia to continue nurturing them for the future?

Jonathan Morris:

If you want to see a little bit more of what we got up to in Hamburg, I think you need to visit our Instagrams.

James Harper:

You do. If you come to mine, at filterstoriespodcast, you will see images of the coffee exchange.

Jonathan Morris:

And I will also post some historical images, not least of the Hamburg harbour in years gone past. Might even add one of James. I feel flattered.

If you'd like to know more about the history of coffee, may I humbly recommend consulting my book, Coffee, A Global History.

James Harper:

Highly recommended, link in the show notes. And if you'd like to support my work making coffee documentaries, you can support me directly on ko-fi.com. That's ko-fi.com forward slash filterstories. It's basically like Patreon, but run by nicer people.

Jonathan Morris:

Well, if you want to buy James a coffee, go to Ko-fi then. If you've enjoyed the episode, please tell your friends, press subscribe.

James Harper:

Another thing that would really, really help us is if you could rate the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and leave a review. And another really helpful thing is create a screen grab of you listening to this podcast, post it on Instagram as a story and then tag us so we can thank you. Which would be brilliant.

History of Coffee was produced by me, James Harper, and you, Professor Jonathan Morris. I edit the episodes and I also write and play the piano music.

Jonathan Morris:

And so goodbye from Hamburg, where the coffee is flowing like the river Elbe. Oh, so poetic.