Tag: supply

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coffee news roasting

Best Coffee Beans in the Netherlands

We all need good coffee beans.

We all want good 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 specialty coffee. 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:

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.

These are, amongst others:

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:

#1 Giraffe

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!

#2 Black and Bloom

Super super sweet Summer berries!

#3 Nordkapp

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.

Categories
coffee news

Technical troubles on a tropical island

Espresso machine

At work, our espresso machine broke down. The pump giving the 9 bars of pressure for the groups won’t start. But when manual flushing it works fine. Local coffee machine supplier Autobev says it’s the circuit boards. My guess is they were fried by a couple of successive power outages and a generator that did not kick in properly not timely.

On an island where everything is shipped in or flown in for emergencies, getting spare parts or qualified technicians is a bit of challenge.

We have several choices:

  1. Get full service from local company and have them order parts and do repairs
  2. Order spare parts from US and fly them in to have local company do repairs
  3. Ship machine to US to have it serviced under warranty and then ship it back
  4. Buy a new machine locally
  5. Buy a new machine in US and ship it to the island

Options 1-3 take several weeks, three at best, and there is no espresso in the mean time.

Option 4 could be good but depends on local supplies. On an island that still consumes vast amounts of instant Folgers, Maxwell House and Nescafé Coffee the odds are against you.

Option 5 is good but also takes at least 2 weeks.

We’re still looking at alternatives but lessons learned are:

  • Put equipment with circuitry on surge suppressors
  • Get a backup espresso machine for emergencies while your machine gets repairs
  • Get the numbers of all your equipment’s customer service and hotlines ready for the grab
Categories
coffee roasting

Sourcing Great Coffee Beans for Sint Maarten

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. 🙂