Roasting coffee beans is easy. You just need a metal pan and fire.
Roasting coffee beans well is slightly harder. You need to pay close attention.
Roasting coffee beans excellently and consistently is both art, talent and science. It requires great skills and experience.
When you roast the coffee beans, the Maillard reaction creates a multitude of chemical compounds from around 145 C and caramelizes sugars present in the bean.
Roasting specialty coffee beans is on another level because they are of higher quality and you are trying to highlight, enhance or bring out certain flavors and tones that make that particular (micro)lot or harvest shine. Do it once and that’s luck. Do it twice and you are good! Do it more than twice and you are a true artist.
In light of celebrating those true coffee artisans and artists out there, here is my highly subjective list of the best coffee bean roasters in the Netherlands:
In alphabetical order:
Black and Bloom, Groningen
Boot Koffie, Baarn
Capriole, Den Haag
Giraffe Coffee Roasters, Rotterdam
Lot61, Amsterdam
Man met bril, Rotterdam
Manhattan Coffee Roasters, Rotterdam
Nordkapp Coffee, Utrecht
Single Estate, Den Haag
Why are they the best? Because they procure excellent beans and are able to create a roast profile that brings out the best of the bean.
They make great every day blends that are always outstanding, but also produce time-limited special editions of simply brilliant and out-of-this-world (micro)lots from somewhere special that just blow your mind.
Drinking those is more like enjoying a fabulous bottle of wine than drinking coffee…
So I decided that this valuable guide to the best coffee beans in the Netherlands needed to be updated!
Christian, January 2024
What are the best coffee beans in the Netherlands? Well, that depends a little on personal taste and favorites, but I can tell you who roast amazing coffee beans in the Netherlands and sell their coffee online!
Traditionally, there are a handful established coffee roasters in the Netherlands who have been producing specialty coffee since it wasn’t called specialtycoffee. These are oldskool roasters who’ve always been on the lookout for great green beans, source great coffee farmers and who know how to source these beans and treat them well. In my opinion, these are:
Capriole Coffee Service, Den Haag (1975) capriole.nl
However, the whole third wave coffee movement have sparked a bunch of great newcomers with new routes, difference sources, smaller batches and that great newcomer creativity and curiosity. They get beans that are “off the beaten path”, if you will, or from non-traditional coffee producing countries.
More recently, since roughly 2010, coffee farmers are experimenting with added fermentation of beans before drying them. This creates a whole range of funky flavors.
Some are pretty large scale roasters already, roasting dozens kilos of coffee every single day to keep production and delivery going. But others are small, artisan roasters, roasting green coffee beans to order once or twice a week.
I’ve had excellent coffee beans from all of these sources, but three that stand out for me and who’s taste I can still recall are:
Fabulous lush sweet yellow fruit tones combined with a medium to full body coffee, just enough bitters and everlasting flavors. And the smell when you brew is intoxicating!
Super tasty creamy coffee with red fruit tones and a full body. But the peculiarity is the thick fermented “wine-like” notes you smell when you open the package.
What’s the best coffee I’ve had from a non-Dutch source, you ask?
Amavida Coffee! ❤ Price was high but the rewards were too!
But don’t take my word for it! Check (the sadly discontinued) “Koffie Top 100” from 2018, which ranked the 100 best places to drink coffee in the Netherlands, and a find a place near you that excels in making coffee. Ranking was made by a professional coffee jury and each venue was visited at least 2x to see if they were consistent. Very impressive list, even today.
For a more recent assessment of coffee in the Netherlands, check the fantastic site koffietje.nl by the always lovely Sam. She brings a personal note to all the coffees she tries. If she likes it, you know it’s good. But if it’s great depends on you!
Update May 2022: Added Blommers to the list after tasting their excellent beans during the Dutch Brewers Cup finals in March 2022 at the Amsterdam Coffee Festival (ACF).
Update Jan 2024: Added Uncommon Amsterdam, Little Roastery and (how could I forget?) the Village Coffee. Small typos corrected and added note about fermentation of beans. Mentioned koffietje.nl. Replaced koffie top 100 link. Boon has closed.
Koffietje.nl already had the great idea to list as many local coffee roasters in the Netherlands with a webshop as possible, so that everyone who’s working at home #stayhome due to Corona crisis can enjoy the best coffee possible. Excellent!
Of course this leaves out those roasters who don’t have a shop (yet)…
Thankfully, Misterbarish.nl already has an extensive list of coffee roasters in the Netherlands (and a list for Belgium). Yay! With these two lists together there is nothing stopping you from ordering fresh roasted coffee beans that suit your taste to brew at home.
Als je thuiswerkt en verse koffiebonen nodig hebt, check dan deze megapost met links naar alle branders in Nederland, die bekend zijn, met een webshop om bonen te bestellen! ☕🌱
Koffietje.nl worstelde met dezelfde gedachten als ik:
Hoe kom ik aan lekkere, goede, verse koffiebonen voor m’n koffie als ik het huis niet meer uit mag?
Bezorgen natuurlijk, maar door wie? Wie brandt nog dagelijks koffiebonen en heeft een webshop waar ik die kan bestellen zodat ze bij mij thuis bezorgd kunnen worden? Want ik wil geen oude bonen! 😀
En als jij zelf nog goede suggesties hebt, geef ze vooral door aan koffietje op facebook! Daar hebben we allemaal wat aan!
PS: Ben je een koffiebrander maar heb je nog geen webshop zodat klanten bij je kunnen bestellen? Neem dan ff contact op! Zelfs met een gratis Google Forms bestelformulier kom je een heel eind en dat is zo gemaakt! Shopify kan ook maar vergt meer tijd, heb je later ook wel weer wat aan.
Cropped shot of a man's hands holding freshly roastd aromatic coffee beans over a modern machine used for roasting beans
The story continues…
After choosing two US coffee roasters from the short list of four for Double Dutch Café, we have entered the next stage.
Amavida.com (Florida)
Batdorfcoffee.com (Washington)
Carib Bean Coffee (Antigua)
We’re ordering samples from both suppliers, determine how the ordering process works and how we must handle the logistics of getting the fresh roasted beans from the warehouse in Miami to Sint Maarten. I trust they will deliver them appropriately to Miami but the warehouse must store them in a temperature controlled environment and ship them in the same way.
It will be learning experience for everyone on our side, because coffee is usually not treated with this much care.
Cropped shot of a man's hands holding freshly roastd aromatic coffee beans over a modern machine used for roasting beans
Getting good coffee on this island is a challenge. That’s funny because we live right in the middle of the some of the world’s best coffee countries. So you’d expect a larger selection. Sadly, the opposite is true.
While every coffee selling business here seems to focus on making coffee from cups (Nespresso, Lavazza, Illy) and the local population mostly used to and stuck with cheap, large scale, commercially produced filter coffee such as Santa Domingo ground coffee, very few places have whole coffee beans to begin with.
When I started to make an inventory of the equipment needed to create a Specialty Coffee shop on St Maarten, I immediately noticed the lack of good grinders & espresso machines, long delivery times, uncertain product availability and total lack of good single-origin coffee beans. Malongo, a large French roaster with a presence on the French side of this island (Saint Martin) was the exception. Sadly, their stock was low, the beans old (almost a year after packaging date, no roast date mentioned anywhere!) and the selection limited to four countries: Brasil, Colombia, Rwanda, Ethiopia. And they had just survived hurricane Irma as well but I have no idea how good or bad their stock survived that storm.
So I am doing what everybody here does: if you can’t get it here and people won’t get it for you, you find and buy it yourself in the US, send it to Miami, FL, and have it shipped here by one of the several shipping companies that visit the island at least twice week. Here’s the list of roasters that I’ve contacted and who’ve replied to me they’d be interested in selling us beans at wholesale:
I’m very excited to make a choice from these wonderful companies, their coffee descriptions online give me a lot of confidence that they are indeed “Third Wave Roasters” and take quality seriously. I still have an order coming in from Malongo that will last a while, but their orders take 2 months to fulfill and that’s simply too long. I contacted Smit & Dorlas in Curaçao but they don’t have single origin coffees, only blends – but can ship these in 2 weeks -, and blends are not what I want to serve in the Double Dutch Cafe for black coffees, if at all possible.
I will blog about the progress that I’m making in getting serious coffee to St Maarten and having people take coffee more seriously on this island. 🙂
No Pressure Coffee 