Kees van der Westen is a Dutch brand known for high-end, high-precision espresso machines that are as elegant in their retro-sleek design as they are edgy. In the US, the allure of the cult-status machines—with suitably mystical-sounding names, such as Mirage and Spirit—boomerangs back to their maker, a faraway industrial-design genius with a reported penchant for driving a 1962 Cadillac and a preference not to be photographed. But to the Dutch he is just “Kees from Brabant,” a friendly businessman from the Netherlands province of North Brabant who will likely visit a coffee bar if it bears one of his handcrafted creations or will just as well receive a local wanting a look-see at his headquarters.

Earlier this year, feeling rather like an Oz-bound Dorothy, I traveled from Amsterdam to Eindhoven to meet Van der Westen. Except for the Cadillac, which had broken down and was apologetically substituted with a Jeep, all of the aforementioned preconceptions became manifest. And in a Wizard-like revelation, so did the paradox of Van der Westen; he is a contemplative speed freak, an off-the-wall pragmatist, and a down-to-earth visionary—all at once. Plus, he is really easy to talk to.

Officially known as Kees van der Westen Espressonistic Works, his workshop and warehouse are contained in side-by-side industrial units in the small town of Waalre, a 10-minute drive from Eindhoven’s rail station. Vintage Faema pieces and framed archival photos add character to the place. The staff, 25 in total, whistle while they work. But the interior is otherwise nondescript. There is no doubt that the machines are what matter most here, that all creativity and concentration are devoted to perfecting the process of making espresso. Van der Westen said this much in reply to 20 questions inquiring about his career history, the coffee he drinks nowadays, and a completely new machine currently in his head but which he soon expects to be at his, and, eventually, the world’s fingertips.

Were you interested in coffee before you began making espresso machines?

No, not really. I drank coffee, but that was mainly to stay awake when working late on projects at school. Just for the caffeine.

How did building espresso machines become your thing?

As a young pig-headed student at the Stedelijk Hoger Instituut voor Industriële Vormgeving [an institute for industrial design in Belgium], I decided to show the Italians the proper way [laughs]. So I started and, well, the first machine gave me a lot of trouble. It exploded a couple of times. But the second one, I really got the hang of. During that year, as I became genuinely interested, I bought a really old one-group machine, restored it, and made my own machine out of it. With that I was actually able to prepare coffee at the school’s end-of-year exhibition where you show your work. I could sell it on the spot—wow.

The buyer was a discotheque in Leuven (I don’t remember the name). For them it was more just a piece to talk about, because discotheques usually operate at night, so more cocktails than coffee there. It sold for 3,500 guilders, about 1,700 euros. You know, being a student you’re always short on cash. All of a sudden I made some money doing what I liked, so that made me think.

After graduating I bought another old machine. I did the same trick but, well, these were the ’80s—I finished school in 1985. During those days, espresso culture in Holland was really nonexistent. There were espresso machines, but everybody was pulling long shots, “lungos,” nothing else. I kept on trying, and I did all kinds of other jobs in between. I did interior designs of hair salons, I drove a truck, did furniture pieces, etc. But every once and in a while, I would return to the espresso machine. I finally got a commission, and then another. These were all one-off machines. I would do the design, come to an agreement about the price, and start to build it, install it, do the servicing. That soon proved to be a very tedious way to work.

Where did you do the work back then?

My girlfriend and I had an apartment in Eindhoven. I used a room to spray-paint there—that room looked awful, we had great trouble with the landlord when we left. But the rough work (the welding and the grinding) was done in a small shed behind my parents’ house. I would come there in the morning, drag out all the bikes, do my work, put back all the bikes in the evening. Soon we found a house with a garage. It looked like a palace at first, but it quickly became crowded. Then we went to a larger workshop and, in 2007, we moved to our current workshop. About a year and a half ago, we added the second unit, and that’s already becoming a bit tight.

How did you begin making espresso machines in series?

In the early ’90s, I came into contact with Kent Bakke. He’s the main American owner of La Marzocco, and of course one of the pioneers of the specialty coffee movement. He bought a machine from me, one of those one-off machines, and paid with two Lineas [the La Marzocco model today known as a Classic], and said: “Well, why not be a distributor in the Netherlands for La Marzocco?” That was a good idea. It came at exactly the right moment, because doing those one-offs, like I said, it’s very tedious. You’re working about two months to finish a machine, and all that time you’re already having to think about the next commission.

Every time I finished a one-off machine, I thought: “If I would build this one again, it would be much better, because this is not entirely perfect, that could be better, etc.” They were prototypes really, and it was difficult to build just one and start a completely different model and design every time. It can be done and it’s fun; it’s also time-consuming and not very cost-effective. So working officially with La Marzocco components, I was finally able to buy boilers and all the [things] I needed to build my own machines in a small series. Before that, I did try to find boilers in Italy, but everybody refused when I asked for 10 or more. They realized, “He might be doing a complete espresso machine instead of just servicing machines.” You could buy all kinds of parts to service and maintain machines, but not to build complete machines. A boiler is not a piece that you usually need to maintain machines.

In about 2002 or 2003, when I started to design a new Mistral, I explained my project to La Marzocco, and they were very interested. They immediately proposed to build that new Mistral. That was a good solution for the problems we had because, back then, we were in a tiny workshop having to build two very different machines—we started the Mirage with the E61 system in 2001—with three people bumping into each other all day. They paid for the design and the prototypes we did, and I got some money for every machine they sold, so it was perfect. In 2004, the distributorship went to somebody else because that was no longer my interest—I really like to build and create new machines. We stopped using La Marzocco components and never did anything together again, but are still very good friends. I like them and they seem to like us—if we don’t become too important anyway [laughs].

How many machines are you producing these days?

There are 52 weeks in a year, but everyone is entitled to six weeks of holiday in the Netherlands, and then some extra days like Christmas and Queen’s Day. So we count 45 production weeks in a year. We’re now approaching 20 machines a week, so that would be 900 a year.

Do you take special orders for machines outside the Mirage, Speedster, and Spirit series?

Not a complete bare machine for just one client, like I did with the one-offs. But we are quite interested in doing customizing. We already have a list with several standard options—for example, all kinds of finishes—but for special one-off customs, we’ve organized the workshop in such a way that we can do 20 to 24 machines a week easily, and still have time to do projects.

It’s important that the technicians have fun, that they keep on finding pleasure in their work. It might become boring if they always had to assemble the same thing day in, day out. All of them are very good technicians with valuable ideas. So, they either help the R&D team with testing out products and ideas, or create a custom design based on their own ideas, just for fun.

Do you visit your clients’ cafes?

I like to go to cafes that have our machines. I like to see what’s going on. We are fond of feedback, especially about things that are not considered correct. That’s the only way to keep on improving: hear about things customers do not like and try to find a solution. So I like to do that, but these days it’s difficult to find the time. Before our marketer, Joris Kingma, came along, I had become a professional e-mailer. That’s the terrible thing: you start a company, you have fun building machines, with wild ideas and all that, but after many years you find yourself at the computer all day. That’s another reason for our recent expansion: to be able to create again. We now have a small, dedicated team to do research and development, to assist me. Before this, everything came from my head—it still does—but now people can draw on computers, for example. I never did that. At home, I still work on one of those old big drafting boards, with paper and pencil. The dimensions are one-to-one; it’s the actual size, and I like that very much.

Can we expect future modifications to the Spirit?

Yeah, well, options, actually. You know, we started development of the Spirit based on the Speedster, with the double boiler. The Spirit is equipped with the so-called multiple-boiler system: one large steam boiler and separate coffee boilers per group. Many people think that if you do specialty coffee, you need at least a double- or, preferably, a multiple-boiler system, but they think that largely without any knowledge of why that it is.

When we stopped with La Marzocco, we only built the Mirage with its thermosyphon heat exchangers, and eventually realized we were never going to be able—from here, from Waalre—to convince the rest of the world that this is a pretty good machine with a technically elegant and efficient system. So we eventually decided, well, why not do a very good single boiler and a very good multiple or double, and customers can choose what they prefer?

When we started to develop that Spirit, we already had experience in Australia, where a proper espresso bar is doing at least a thousand cups a day, some even toward 2,000, and that’s before two o’clock in the afternoon. So we tried to create a machine that could easily handle those quantities. This means that a barista needs proper feedback from the machine and can work efficiently and ergonomically to produce that number of coffees. On the other hand, there are a lot of baristas who like to be able to play, adjust, and taste in the slow way, and that’s not something the Spirit is best for—it’s built as a strong, dependable workhorse, but very precise, with very high capacity. So that’s what we are going to add: the ability to adjust more parameters in order to offer both qualities in one machine.

But the things to adjust should, after adjustment, function automatically. What I don’t think is favorable in an extremely busy surrounding is that you have to monitor each extraction process, each shot, manually. If baristas do over a thousand cups a day, then they should be able to activate the group in one bold move, and the complete shot should be done perfectly by the machine, just as the barista had adjusted for when he or she started the shift. We want to be able to prime and adjust everything, but then allow for banging out several shots simultaneously for hours on end—that needs to be one continuous fluid process without any interruption.

You mentioned some new projects in the works. Care to say more?

We are constantly working on lots of projects, but most only started a couple of months ago, so not much is finished yet. That’s a bit of a frustration; things seem to take longer than when I did everything myself [laughs]. I can tell you a little bit, but the tricky part is, if you talk about something, people tend to withhold their orders until it is available. We experienced that in the past when we talked about the Spirit coming along in 2012, and sales of the Mirage dropped immediately.

We have projects to investigate insulation underway. What’s the effect of insulation? This is something we are measuring with logging devices. We have several types and are comparing our findings to types without the insulation.

The Spirit is built for super-high capacity, and yet it remains very precise at all parameters: temperature, pressure, quantities, infusion. Temperature, pressure, and quantities can all be adjusted per group and on the fly. We now are going to offer more and easier ways to adjust the infusion. An example is a project to develop the possibility to easily switch between different sizes of jets. We are thinking about a system that can have three jets; the jets are quite important for pre-infusion to develop properly. Yet another project entails ideas to improve on progressive pre-infusion, adjusting the amount of water, time, and/or pressure during infusion.

Infusion is super important. There’s been hype in the last couple years around pressure profiling—I don’t believe in it much. Of course the first part of the extraction, the pre-infusion, is actually a kind of profiling, though only at the initial part of the extraction, the first 15 seconds max. Pressure profiling is one hype that came down to not much.

The current hype is scales—this one might indeed go through. Scales actually offer a worthwhile addition for the guy behind the machine that might help quite a bit, to get real consistency in the end product. This may be something we start work on as well. But if you think about an improvement and you invest a lot of energy, months of work and a lot of money to bring it to market, and it then turns out to be a flop, you’ve lost a lot. That can be a tricky thing for a small company, so our strategy is to see what’s going on, and if something really catches on, we jump onboard as well. We try to catch the wave as early as we can.

Are all the new projects for the Spirit?

No, we are also working on ideas for a completely new machine with a promising new technical setup. It will be really different, with very good heat capabilities and much less energy consumption, all that.

The new machine, I can tell you, will have clear family resemblance to the rest of our machines. You will see it and immediately recognize it as our work. Several styling features will be combined, the good ones of course. It cannot be low cost, but it will not be as expensive as the Spirit.

Being at a lower price scale, it will probably not have many options. The big difference is with the Spirit, you build a machine that’s as complete as possible—you don’t have to order anything, it’s already all there. The new one will be more basic. We want a good-looking machine, strongly built, performing very precisely, with only some of the more important options. And that’s it. However, even if all goes well, we don’t expect to offer anything new before way into 2017.

Some of those smaller projects for the Spirit will hopefully become available this year; 2016 looks to be a very exciting year for us.

Contemporary Dutch design is often thought of as straightforward and sober. How did your designs come to defy that?

There’s more to it, you know. When I was at school in the early ’80s, there was a movement in Italy by people like Ettore Sottsass (from the Memphis Group), Alessandro Mendini (from Studio Alchimia) and many others. These designers were getting sick of those mandatory clean lines, the Bauhaus style. They wanted more energy and creativity, and were inspired by Pop Art. They went way beyond everything that was accepted: strange colors and shapes, low-cost materials, low culture made into high culture. It was a big movement when I was at school. I like Bauhaus, but not for my machines. Espresso machines should look speedy; espresso is, after all, a fast coffee.

One of the problems is that we are in the Netherlands. Here, whatever machine you build, it will always be more expensive than if you’re in Italy. The only thing we can do is make up for that extra in price by having a better-looking machine, a stronger-built machine, with higher capacity.

Sometimes people come to me and admit they’ve always thought our machines are elegant-looking but therefore surely can’t be very strong. Similar to the old idea of a Ferrari: very fast but easily breaks down. Of course, that’s not the case with our machines. We intend to have Land Rover-quality strength with the looks and performance of a Ferrari.

Is there one machine you enjoy making more than others?

Enzo Ferrari was once asked: “Of all the cars you’ve created, what car do you like the most?” He replied: “The next one!” I still like this one [points to a Spirit being used for R&D]. I still like the Mirage. I love them all, but I’m most enthusiastic about the next one, the one you’re working on, the one that’s in your head all the time.

Where is your biggest market?

The Australasia region, it is really huge. It’s actually an area where, for centuries on centuries, they were drinking tea. And now they all switched to coffee because it’s the hip thing to do. I just visited Tokyo and Seoul; they are like Germans but more elegant, and maybe even better, strictly focused on high quality. If they do it, they do it properly.

What about the Netherlands’ espresso history?

Espresso machines were introduced in the ’60s here, I know some of the guys who sold them. They used to sell jukeboxes in the ’50s and start of the ’60s, and that demand went down, so they said: “Well, why not espresso machines?” But they weren’t persuasive enough to, along with selling espresso machines, also sell the culture of the espresso from Italy, the small cups and the proper cappuccinos and all that. So what happened is everybody bought an espresso machine, but they kept on doing the familiar long cups, lungos only. Of course, things improved by having every cup made freshly, some crema even—you could have something that looked like cappuccino, with just some fluff on top. Sadly, doing lungos for 30 years and then switching to specialty coffee—having bright blends and shorter shots—has proven to be a difficult change for many.

In the States, they had more luck. They just had those long cups; you could see the bottom, the second was for free, it was not exactly high quality. Then espresso came along and that was introduced as a “specialty coffee”—a gourmet type of drink, a completely different thing from the stuff Americans were used to. That was a much better way to persuade everybody to try it. Here you have to turn around the attitude, and I think that is one of the reasons we, all over Europe, have been very slow to adopt the new wave thing. Specialty coffee: it’s just young people, eh?

Have any of your machines appeared in surprising places?

Several years ago, Google ordered a couple of Spirits, and on the illuminated panel they asked for it to read “Android” [laughs]. Sometimes our machines appear in the movies, that’s fun as well. On a plane ride I just saw The Intern, with Robert De Niro getting his coffee from a Spirit.

Do you ever tour the US?

Yeah, in the last couple of years I started doing the occasional trip with the family, with the girls. These trips offer pleasure in business. In 2014, we went to Seattle, visited Slayer, visited La Marzocco and Synesso. We went to a lot of cafes. After that, to San Francisco. We try to see and talk to as many people as possible. It is very inspiring.

How many daughters do you have?

Three, aged 24, 23, and 21. They are still in school, and live across Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Utrecht. They have all worked as baristas and got their barista certifications on their own. Slowly, they are starting work here, one day a week. We’ll see. If you start pushing, it will go the opposite way you want it to.

Is their mother involved in coffee?

Yeah—drinking it every morning [laughs]. Coffee is essential at home; I have several machines there. I’m currently using an old prototype Speedster. I try to be the barista at home.

What coffee does Kees van der Westen Espressonistic Works drink in-house?

Well, we have to use the coffee that most guys in the shop like. We usually have Blanche Dael in the hopper, a specialty roaster from Maastricht, but not always. My personal preference in the morning is a double espresso with just a touch of sugar, to start up—it’s quite like a fluid bonbon, a chocolate—and later I will drink cappuccinos and straight espressos. We are using their Ristretto blend, that’s a real southern Italian type [laughs]. Next to the occasional adventurous fruity bright coffee, I generally am still fond of the nutty, earthy, and chocolatey type. I’m 60, I’m really old-school.

Karina Hof is a Sprudge staff writer based in Amsterdam. Read more Karina Hof on Sprudge. 

Factory photos courtesy Kees van der Westen Espressonistic Works. 

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La Marzocco has described its ubiquitous Linea Classic as “a tried and true machine” that is “carefully designed to blend into any setting.” Sometimes that kind of staid stainless steel finish is what a busy coffee shop calls for. But in the same way that a cashmere crewneck sweater does not do it for everyone, a classic-style machine does not befit all bars, or at least not forever. Customization is all the rage these days, and here in the Netherlands some compelling work is being done by a brand called Zink.

Since early 2014, the Dutch design company has been elevating the unequivocally unlowly La Marzocco into something even more exclusive. Their current focus is on the looks of the Linea Classic, in its two-, three-, and four-group versions, though Zink has a long list of customization ideas for both inside and outside the machine, as well as for other models.

The two-man startup is powered by Tijs Wilbrink and Paul Schilperoord. The friends first met as undergrads in mechanical engineering and have, in the 20 years since, enjoyed comparing notes on “espresso design and culture.” Wilbrink, a business development specialist with past job experience at big-league corporations, such as IBM and ABN AMRO, oversees Zink’s marketing. Schilperoord is the creative director who—talk about opportunities for cross-fertilization—also works as a freelance designer for La Marzocco. If his name sounds familiar it may be because Schilperoord is credited for designing La Curva, the prototype lever espresso machine revealed at Out of the Box 2015.

With four series presently on the market and costs not too steep—prices range from 1,500 to 3,500 euros—Zink customizations have begun appearing around the world.

Most dramatic is the X1 series. To convert the Linea’s silhouette from upright parallelogram to sloping low-rider, Zink chops away parts of the original frame, most noticeably the upper back panel and cup tray. A rectangular window reveals a color powder-coated steam boiler. For the first two X1s ever made, red was applied, not only matching the La Marzocco logo that is steel-cut and fixed to the facade, but emulating the peekaboo engine of the Ferrari F430 that was Schilperoord’s inspiration for the design.

The first X1 debuted at a Mahlkönig booth during the 2015 Internorga trade show in Hamburg, Germany. The second, meanwhile, is seeing lots of action in the busy Dutch train station of Utrecht Centraal at ’t Koffiehuis en Bar. Its proprietors, HMS Host, have ordered a purple variation for their coffee bar at Café Chocolat in Lounge 1 of Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport.

Not ready to subject your Classic to metal grinders? Or, perhaps your aesthetic is less aerodynamically inclined? There are other—reversible—options.

Zink calls its three Z series “retrofit kits.” These don’t require a relinquishing of the machine because all the customized bodywork is shipped in a single box for self-assembly with the aid of basic tools.

“It’s not very complicated,” Schilperoord assures. “It’s basically loosening screws.”

The Z1 wraps two rows of colored steel around the rear and side panels, with pieces of honeycomb grille inlaid between. That kit has reportedly already found its way far from Zink’s workshop in The Hague, to clients in Seattle, Malaysia, and Australia—but there’s one in Amsterdam, too.

Essentially providing a customized façade, the Z2 replaces the machine’s original shell with colored panels and an upper glass pane bearing La Marzocco’s heraldic lion, plus space for a personalized logo. By spring 2016, the Z2 should be available via La Marzocco’s online store.

For a steampunkier look, there is the Z3. Its three glass panels expose all the mechanism’s inner workings, and neo-Victorian fantasies can be enhanced by sending Zink the original stainless steel boiler for a color powder-coating. Want an in-person Z3 experience par excellence? When next in Utrecht (after admiring the X1 at the rail station), go ogle the canary-yellow boiler and matching steel panel at the branch of The Village that recently opened in a former prison.

Though still just in their 3D rendering stage, customization designs are underway for La Marzocco’s GS3 and Strada as well.

“What I am interested in [is] going back to the 1950s espresso machine with these wild curves and exotic shapes,” says Schilperoord, discussing a computerized depiction of the Strada customization, tentatively named the Z4. “I do like the fact that there’s more body or volume to the machine, because some of the machines from the ’60s on, they’re really straight; also, the sides are really straight. So here, I’m trying to put more shape into the sides, so these sides are a bit bigger actually, and they angle up and they angle downwards.”

An appreciation for expressive vintage design may not be so unusual for a mechanical engineer who went on to get a Master’s degree at the Florence Design Academy and cherishes childhood memories of his father’s classic lever La Pavoni. The fact that Schilperoord is a Dutchman who moonlights with La Marzocco and is now building a Dutch business on customizing their equipment is, however, highly coincidental with the historical circumstances of a major industry player. That would be an individual whose high-end espresso machines, handcrafted in the Netherlands for decades, are synonymous with speed and style: Kees van der Westen, recently profiled elsewhere in these pages. If Zink persists, Schilperoord and Wilbrink may soon be keeping their compatriot in stylish company.

Karina Hof is a Sprudge staff writer based in Amsterdam. Read more Karina Hof on Sprudge. 

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March 19 marked the last day of winter in the Netherlands and the steamiest night of the year for filter coffee enthusiasts. It was the Dutch AeroPress Championship, hosted for a third time by Coffee Company in Amsterdam.

“Het ziet er gezellig uit!” (“That looks cozy!”) said a taxi driver on depositing a reporter at the cafe’s flagship Oosterdok location. A white tent marked the entrance, giving it an elegant nuptial air (unexpected in these low-frills Lowlands but apt with a competition hashtag of #sayyestothepress). Through the windows, marigold rays of light silhouetted the very many bodies standing shoulder to shoulder, bouncy but polite, beer-sipping yet still caffeinated.

Over four hours, 27 coffee professionals from around the country competed to impress with their best pressings of Coffee Company’s official competition bean: a fully washed coffee from Finca Filadelfia in Huila, Colombia.

Judges were kept, as plucky co-MC Kim Staalman put it, “hard aan het slurpen,” which is Dutch for something like “slurping diligently.” Presiding were Zsuzsa Zichó from Modern Standard Coffee, Damian Durda, formerly of Bonanza, and Matt Sealby from Falcon Coffees. Called on to settle one disagreement on taste, which involved a uniquely sweet cup with notes of mango, was head judge Jasper Uhlenbusch, brand director and green coffee buyer at Coffee Company.

The tensest round came when 2015 Dutch AeroPress champ Floris van der Burg, a barista at White Label Coffee, competed in a trio against both owners of fellow Amsterdam cafe Trakteren, Edward Beumer and Erik Oosterhuis. Wearing a dark blazer over a mandarin collar, Van der Burg well played the role of AeroPressor Emeritus, all his accouterments sprucely branded with home cafe stickers. But it was Beumer, understated as usual in a Western plaid button-up unbuttoned over an industry T, who won the round.

And it was his 30/220 gram coffee/water recipe that later got Beumer the gold. Asked how he felt after championship host Stijn Braas proclaimed him winner, Beumer beamed.

“It was a real funny story because two of our clients wanted to participate,” he told Sprudge. “Those clients like coffee very much, like the AeroPress very much, but they are not baristas, so they challenged us to rethink the whole process. So then we gave it a little extra because we want to set a good example.”

He added: “I never thought it would happen, but I really wanted a trophy.”

And before long, friends had swept Beumer off his feet, hoisting him up for a better view westward—towards Dublin, home to the 2016 World AeroPress Championships this June.

The winning recipes:

First Place: Edward Beumer, Trakteren of Amsterdam

Coffee/water (grams): 30/220
Grind: 10 (Mahlkönig EK 43)
Grind 30 grams coarsely (reversed)
Pour 85 degrees Celsius water in 15 seconds to 120 grams
Stir 15 seconds
Flip, steep for 30 seconds
Press, add 100 grams of water
Serve

Second Place: Jasper Tuls, Coffee Company of Amsterdam

Coffee/water (grams): 18.5/250
Grind: 7.75 (Mahlkönig EK 43)
Grind 18.5 grams on 7.75 on EK
50-gram bloom with 80 degrees Celsius water
At 30 seconds, pour to 250 grams (65 degrees Celsius water)
Stir 3x smoothly
At 1:10 press in 30 seconds

Third Place: Ben Richardson, Bocca Coffee of Amsterdam

Coffee/water (grams): 20/240
Grind: Filter fine, 6 ( Mahlkönig EK 43)
Dose, pour 78 degrees Celsius 160 milliliters, stir 5x
Steep 30 seconds
Slow, controlled push
Test total dissolved solids
Dilute to awesome drinking strength!!!

Karina Hof is a Sprudge staff writer based in Amsterdam. Read more Karina Hof on Sprudge. 

Photos courtesy of Karina Hof and Pim Rinkes.

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The Amsterdam Coffee Festival was a hot ticket, this year taking place from March 18 to 20 in the Westergasfabriek. The former gas factory is better known in the Dutch capital’s history as a place for mega techno parties, but ACF 2016 generated its own kind of ecstasies, with over 100 brands represented by industry veterans, newcomers, and familiar faces seen in a fresh light.

1) Dutch Brewers Cup

Not an everyday sighting in these Low Countries, the Phoenix70 is what let Rob Kerkhoff arise from his very own ashes to become, once again, the 2016 Dutch Brewers Cup Champion. The futuristic-looking apparatus was a fitting choice for this barista who has prior called himself “Robocup. Part man. Part machine.” Last year, Kerkhoff placed fifth in the World Brewers Cup with his Chemex and Espro Press paired method, and he has since become one fourth of the team behind Keen Coffee…

2) Keen Coffee

Rob Kerkhoff’s win, just steps from the booth where Keen Coffee debuted the same day, was a grand slam for the new coffee supply and training collective. And if their crystal-clear festival literature is any indication (they gave out a how-to for keeping coffee fresh, a user’s guide to the Phoenix70, and Kerkhoff’s recipe), they’re very capable educators. Co-founder and fellow barista Bonne Postma happily announced that their Brewers Cup-winning natural Colombian coffee from Las Margaritas farm in Campo Azul sold out at ACF. Fortunately, Keen’s other half, Tosca Schuitemaker and Jan Schuitemaker, are roasters.

3) Scandinavian Embassy

In the VIP suite, away from the hubbub of stands and stages, Amsterdam cafe Scandinavian Embassy served a sit-down three-course food and coffee pairing. This was no avocado-toast kind of affair, but more like—take the second course as an example—scallops flambéed in gin and roasted coffee flowers, served with a pour-over of Lomi Tasha Yirgacheffe roasted by Per Nordby. On brief breaks during the sold-out seatings, chef Rikard Anderrson and barista Nicolas Castagno could be seen doing restorative stretches, à la Williams sisters between sets. Their next match: the London Coffee Festival.

4) April Tea

Like the first-flush month her tea company is named for, Talitha Czaikowski brought her Persephoneous spirit and usual warmth to ACF. April Tea showcased leaves for summer beverage, such as their Herbal Hibiscus, which visitors could sample as a cold drink paired with dark chocolate, and their umami-noted Sencha paired with Parmesan cheese. Practical, too, was the White Tea, which according to Czaikowski—who is a business partner to Bocca Coffee and the life partner of Bocca’s strategy and development half, Menno Simons—helped cleanse the palate of coffee tastes.

5) Dutch Barista Competition

Audiences experienced double déjà vu when 2015 Dutch Barista Champion Lex Wenneker, like his brewing colleague Kerkhoff, won for a second year in a row. His World Barista Competition experience helped prepare him for Amsterdam 2016, Wenneker told Sprudge, noting that “the [national] competition was even harder this year.” Cafe Granja La Esperanza produced all his competition coffee, with a signature drink taking the form of espresso blended in a Magic Bullet with raspberry-infused green apple juice and lavender-infused black tea. When Headfirst Coffee Roasters, the roaster and cafe he co-owned, closed this past fall, many Amsterdam loyalists were crushed, though Wenneker found not having to run a business while practicing “slightly more relaxing.”

6) Based on Roots

“We are not so young anymore but our company is quite young,” laughed Conny Bouwman. Making their festival premiere, she and “business partner and partner in everything” Bernadette van Beek are the friendly entrepreneurs behind Based on Roots. The Nijmegen-based duo curates lifestyle products in contemporary styles that catch the eye and with craftsmanship that convinces the hand. Most must-have were Chanto espresso cups and Milco Handy Coffee Mills, both designed by Takumi Shimamura and available for purchase online .

7) Stooker

ACF 2016 marked precisely one year of existence for Stooker Roasting Company, but the Amsterdam roaster and Specialty Coffee Association of Europe-certified educator seemed anything but sophomoric. In brand-new, navy blazers with gold script embroidery, the team was doing what they do best: selling meticulously prepared coffee and imparting wisdom to aficionados of all levels. Fulfilling the promise on their blue A-frame sign, Stooker Roasting Academy randomly chose one festival-goer to win two free coffee-ed modules. As co-founder Florian Hessel explained: “We only do SCAE-certified training because we believe we can roast the hell out of every coffee, but if you don’t brew it right, it still tastes like crap.”

8) This Side Up

Talk to any serious Dutch micro-roaster and one name is sure to come up: Lennart Clerkx. His fair-value sourcing company This Side Up brought some of the Rwandan coffee producers he works with to be present at the festival and, in so doing, even got diplomats talking. “We decided to create a space where Rwandan coffee producers can get inspired by seeing up close how their coffees taste and look as a finished specialty product,” a Rwandan embassy counselor said of the initiative, as quoted in Rwandan daily New Times. Alongside Clerkx, proud client White Label Coffee served coffee produced at eight washing stations across Rwanda.

9) Dutch Cup Tasters Champion

When charismatic MC Keri Mol proclaimed Frans van den Berg the 2016 Dutch Cup Tasters Champion, not only was it a victory for the 21 year old, it was quite the upset to a three-year winning streak. Van den Berg, one half of the mobile espresso bar service known as the Barista Brothers, beat Yoeri Joosten, who had enjoyed a 2013, 2014, and 2015 trifecta and ranked third in the last World Cup Tasters Championship. A Facebook post by the Barista Brothers summarized their reaction in a word: “HOLYSHIT!!!!!”

10) Weezer Pulling Shots?!

Why on earth was the lead singer of Weezer spotted behind a La Marzocco Linea Classic customized with Zink’s school bus-yellow retro-fit panels? Wait, that’s no alterna-pop icon—it’s Yakup Aydin. (Though ooh wee ooh he looks just like Rivers Cuomo!) The Dutch Barista Champion 2010, who now works the bar at Bocca’s Amsterdam flagship, spent his ACF serving up Modbar-made drinks around the bend, where trusty Dutch industry supplier Espresso Service West had set up shop and attracted a bunch more “celebaristas.”

Karina Hof is a Sprudge staff writer based in Amsterdam. Read more Karina Hof on Sprudge. 

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The 2016 edition of the London Coffee Festival was the biggest yet, packed with cafe pop-ups, two giant coffee competitions, innovative product launches, art galleries, DJs, and much more. But one of the most pleasant surprises for me was the extended House of Coffee & Company VIP suite, which this year was dedicated selected specialty cafes and a pop-up by Amsterdam-based cafe and restaurant Scandinavian Embassy.

The pop-up was a fantastic opportunity to get a taste of the Scandinavian Embassy’s much-lauded approach to food and coffee pairings in London. Head Chef Rikard Anderrson and Head Barista Nicolas Castagno were there to interact with the guests throughout the tasting, explaining the concept behind each of the dishes and the flavor notes of the coffees.

Some of that intimate atmosphere and connection between chef, barista, and customer that makes Scandinavian Embassy’s De Pijp cafe so special, was lost at the festival due to the large scale of the operation (they had around 30–40 covers per sitting at peak times). However, the wonderful and clever pairings of coffee and food, that make Scandinavian Embassy unique, were all there.

The pop-up’s three-course meal featured an unlikely combination of coffee and seafood, drawing elements from dishes previously served at Scandinavian Embassy. Each dish brought out the complexities of the three coffees presented by Castagno.

The first dish was a trio of espresso-smoked oyster, mussel with coffee-infused vinegar, and clam with cascara butter. It was paired with a chilled Colombian espresso from Finca El Paraiso in El Gigange, Huila, roasted by Koppi of Helsingborg, Sweden. The oyster brought out the roasted flavors of the espresso, while the mussel highlighted the acidic tones of the coffee. The clam pairing was all about buttery mouthfeel.

The second dish was a scallop flambéed with Herno Gin (“the best gin in the world” according to Anderrson), stewed with cascara and topped with deep-fried coffee flowers. The matching coffee—a hot Ethiopia Yirgacheffe Natural Tchembe Guji, roasted by Per Nordby in Gothenberg Sweden—was served in elegant wine glasses. The gin is used to soften the harsh seafood flavors so that the scallop pairs nicely with the bright, light-bodied coffee.

The last dish was a herring and beetroot tartare served with a pour-over made from Ethiopian beans (Lomi Tasha, Yirgacheffe, also by Per Nordby). The round mouthfeel of the coffee created an interesting contrast with the smokiness of the beetroot. This coffee was served in a saucer (beautifully handmade by Scandinavian Embassy barista Daniella Nyström), a way of drinking coffee which goes back to an old Swedish tradition. The saucer lets the coffee temperature drop more quickly; it makes you process the coffee differently in your mouth as the plate lets the coffee open and invites to slurp, and the smell of the coffee is also more prominent as the nose is closer to the coffee.

The Scandinavian Embassy pop-up proved to be an interesting and popular addition to the festival’s line up of events, especially for those discerning foodies looking for something more than coffee. Picking Scandinavian Embassy up out of the comfy confines of their Amsterdam operation, and putting them in front of hundreds of London Coffee Festival VIPs for a weekend was a bold move and quite a challenge. Andersson, Castagno and the team at Scandinavian Embassy rose to the occasion, and should consider this installation a success.

Giulia Mule (@mulia) is a Sprudge.com contributor based in London. Read more Giulia Mule on Sprudge. 

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Once upon a time, in the canal-ribboned village of Amsterdam, in an era when Starbucks was opening its first fully owned store in the city and Adele was crooning “Someone Like You” across airwaves, the stars were starting to align for the co-owners of cafe and micro-roaster Sweet Cup.

She was a 27-year-old Amsterdammer who had just ended a relationship with an Australian she shared a home and a restaurant with, and she needed a job. He was a 27-year-old from Breda who had just returned from travels in the US and, having worked in every aspect of a kitchen since his early teens, was ready to begin fresh. He also needed a job.

Audience, envision those split-screen frames merging into one, with the caption: “The Netherlands, 2011.” The scene cuts to Lisa Rooimans and Paul van Duuren stationed behind an espresso machine, which is set up on the bed of a red three-wheeled Piaggio commercial scooter. It is here that the couple met, working as baristas for MobiCcino, a Dutch company whose mobile espresso bars appear at events around the country.

Fast-forward to a spring day in 2013. Rooimans and Van Duuren welcome their brick-and-mortar baby into the world. And in the three years since, Sweet Cup has become a mainstay in Amsterdam’s specialty coffee scene. Its beans are carried by a number of Dutch cafes—Back to Black, just one canal away, has long been a customer—with occasional cameos elsewhere in Europe. Its loyal clients are neighborhood residents, people who work in the area, and, as Rooimans puts it, “the coffee lovers who come on their day off.”

Having like-minded patrons means a lot to her and van Duuren. In fact, it was a lack thereof that had pushed him to leave MobiCcino.

“I didn’t feel the people I served were on the same page regarding coffee as I was,” says van Duuren, referring to the corporate booth-keepers between which the mobile bar was often parked. “Most of them just wanted a break, [to get] away from their stand.”

Rooimans points out, too, that the gigs were not always assigned to multiple baristas, so it could become lonely.

“I got a lot of experience working with different espresso machines and grinders at very diverse locations, which most of the time was a good thing, [but] sometimes not so much—like working outside when it was freezing,” she recalls.

Nowadays, their careers seem far from cold. Rooimans and van Duuren do their own thing, and tend to stay low-key about it. One reason they may have gotten less of the limelight than some of their Amsterdam coffee colleagues might have to do with their own modesty, combined with the couple’s cozy sense of self-sustenance.

This past February, when Sweet Cup relaunched in a bigger and brighter space, the official announcement was a mere 16-word post on Facebook (the core line read simply: “We are open again!!”). Fortunately, the new venue isn’t hard to find, being just a few doors west of the original shop.

In this setup, van Duuren needs only to pivot a heel to toggle between working the bar and roasting. Maintaining Sweet Cup’s standard eight-roast offering (four for filter, four for espresso), he roasts two to three times a week, manually on a Giesen W6. Rooimans, a baker, now has a separate kitchen in which to concoct her Anglo-inspired confections as well as all that will be entailed when plans to serve breakfast and lunch materialize.

The duo’s DIY dynamism is visible all over the new space. Most striking is their tile work—wooden planks in shades of grown-up flavors of ice cream (e.g., pistachio and hazelnut)—on an accent wall and Sweet Cup’s L-shaped bar. Its surface provides a comfortable fit for the one-group Synesso Hydra, two Mazzer Kony grinders, a Mahlkönig Guatemala Lab grinder, and a filter station.

Sweet Cup’s dedication to slow coffee is also evidenced by the Everpure reverse-osmosis water filter system, purchased along with the Synesso when transitioning from a two-group La Marzocco Linea Classic.  “The RO system makes a big difference,” explains Rooimans. “What tipped us over [to make the purchase] were actually the filter/drip brews. We bought it for all our coffees and teas.”

There is one fixture that is not new, although its spot in the cafe’s layout has improved. That would be Sjefke, the 4-year-old basset hound often found lying right in front of the roaster, where the aromas are optimal.

Audience, are you still wearing those rom-com spectacles?

Cue the crane shot. Then to a close-up of those droopy puppy eyes. Zoom out to the bustling coffee bar, expertly commanded by Rooimans and van Duuren. Then out again to the registered historical building that Sweet Cup occupies, sunlight hitting its white gable. Next, to the street, connecting the tourists of Leidseplein with the galleries and antique boutiques of the Spiegelkwartier. Then pan out to Amsterdam, then to Earth. Now zoom back in, to a cup topped with a microfoam heart. And…scene!

Sweet Cup is located at Lange Leidsedwarsstraat 93, Amsterdam. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Karina Hof is a Sprudge staff writer based in Amsterdam. Read more Karina Hof on Sprudge. 

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Kees van der Westen, the man, may be camera-shy, but the newest engineering development for his Spirit and Speedster espresso machines proved most photogenic in Dublin this week.

Making its global debut at the World of Coffee trade show is what the Kees van der Westen team calls a progressive pre-infusion cylinder system: PPIC for short. This technology allows a barista to take hands-on control of pre-infusion—that is, the initial wetting of the coffee puck that occurs before an espresso shot is extracted from a machine.

By simply turning a knob, the barista can now manually modify the pressure involved in the infusion process. A glass cylinder lets the barista see the spring-loaded piston in motion, relying on its rise as a visual cue and reading the pressure gauge for instant feedback. Plus, since each group has its own knob, a machine can have as many pre-infusion settings as there are groups. This also means that different espresso types or preparations can be simultaneously dialed in on a single piece of equipment.

Earlier this year, when Sprudge visited Kees van der Westen Espressonistic Works in Waalre, the Netherlands, it was clear that this particular parameter mattered to the industrial engineer renowned for his retro speed-inflected design. “We now are going to offer more and easier ways to adjust the infusion,” KVDW said then, alluding to this project then in the works.

And six months later, poof! Proof was scattered across the show floor of the Irish capital at World of Coffee. Of the three PPIC-fitted prototype machines in operation, the most prominently placed was a two-group Spirit with a customized PEAK panel at the Mahlkönig stand. Over in the microcosm of cafe and roaster booths known as The Village, a similar Spirit was commandeered by Bailies Coffee, the Belfast-based company that recently became a Kees van der Westen distributor for Ireland and Northern Ireland. Littlest but not least was the one-group Speedster being doted on by IMS, the group screen and filter basket specialists from Italy.

“We already had quite a nice infusion system,” Van der Westen says of the earlier Spirit and Speedster models, “but we found that people—baristas—want to play with adjusting things, getting feedback, and working on the machine. And yet, when they are done playing in the morning, everything should stay adjusted to their preferences.”

Precise pre-infusion reportedly has benefits such as preventing channeling, locking the fines in place, and optimizing grind quality. For laymen it’s a bit of a rabbit hole—explaining channeling, and the fight against it, could make for an entire other article. But for hardcore espresso enthusiasts and professionals, this is the stuff coffee dreams are made of.

Kess van der Westen engineer Omri Almagor.

According to mechanical engineer Omri Almagor, a finer grind is desirable for the light- and medium-roasted coffees popular in the specialty market. He explains: “You get more solids, you get more fibers, more fat, and then you can see much more crema than you usually see—usually the bright coffees look bad.”

Almagor, who works in the R&D division of Espressonistic Works, is credited by his boss for the winning idea of a transparent yet durable cylinder.

“I was thinking of slits, but glass is better,” Van der Westen says. “We like to keep things close to the human being. If people can see what’s actually happening inside, they can understand it very easily.”

Following some minor modifications and tests in real-time surroundings, the Kees van der Westen PPIC-fitted (and retrofitted) machines are expected to be available by October. In the meantime, the company welcomes preorders for what appears to be pre-infusion perfection.

Karina Hof is a Sprudge staff writer based in Amsterdam. Read more Karina Hof on Sprudge. 

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When Holland Sam boarded the small boat with 44 other people, he didn’t know if he would make it. He could swim, very well in fact, but not all the way from Turkey to Greece.

Though he’d endured winter temperatures in Moscow, when he worked in the tech department of a clothing company, that sail across the sea delivered a different kind of cold. So when three hours later, the refugees found themselves on Greek shores, Sam was jubilant. He started taking photos, sending selfie proof to his family that “I am OK.”

His parents and younger brother had moved to Damascus, Syria, after their home in Aleppo was obliterated. Having graduated from a Syrian university with a math degree, Sam, who had also worked at an import/export company in Egypt and in Dubai’s tourism industry, was not a naïve traveler. He and his companions knew that lacking papers to legally transit through some countries on their journey would necessitate avoiding public transportation. In Greece, they walked for three days to reach Macedonia. There, they rode a bus to Serbia. In Hungary, a country whose authorities have had notoriously unreceptive practices towards refugees, they were back on foot. They walked for five days, eating only a bit of food, bread primarily, and sleeping outdoors, with scorpion and snake sightings along the way. Eventually, Holland Sam—which is not his real name but the one he uses online—got in a car bound for Germany. From there, he took a train to the Netherlands. In the city of Utrecht, he entered a police station and said to an officer: “I am from Syria. This is my passport.”

Meanwhile, about 35 kilometers away, Amsterdam resident Merel Steinweg was nearing the end of her second pregnancy. With two young children, she and her husband could imagine moving out of the Dutch capital, finding a home with more room and maybe a garden or some nature nearby for the kids to play in. But as someone living in the town where she had grown up and with her parents just on the other side of the Amstel River, it wouldn’t be so easy to leave. Plus, by the time her second baby was a few months old, Steinweg could go back to work. She had already made a career for herself as a child rearing and development specialist, who not long ago began focusing on youth policy. Outspoken in a gentle way, she has an apt first name. “Merel” is the Dutch word for “blackbird,” a species common in the Netherlands and heard singing exuberantly from trees and rooftops. Her four days a week as a freelance consultant tend to be spent in her office at a community theater that rents out workspaces. Before heading there, many mornings after dropping by the daycare center, she might sit at the corner cafe and order her regular.

These are slices of life from 2015 that Sam and Steinweg shared a year later, on a June morning, over an americano and a cappuccino. The 29-year-old Aleppo native and the 31-year-old Amsterdammer, who had never met before, sat side by side, talking on benches outside the Amsterdam South branch of Anne & Max.

One of eight in the Dutch franchise, this Anne & Max, like others, has cheerful staff, an array of simply prepared dishes made from fresh, organic ingredients, and what in this country is a pretty progressive coffee program for a place that does not promote itself as such. The drink menu offers single-origin espressos, filter à la French press, bottled slow-drip by Batavia Coffee, and cascara tea.

What makes this particular branch unlike others in the chain or, for that matter, any other cafe in Amsterdam, however, is the small silver box on the bar. Once a tin holding tea, it sits back to back with a Mazzer Kony grinder and in the shade of a three-group La Marzocco Linea Classic espresso machine. On the box lid, a taped note invites patrons to drop in their fully stamped frequent-customer cards and, in so doing, to donate a resulting tenth free coffee to a pair of people who, like Sam and Steinweg, connect through the Refugee Start Force.

The Refugee Start Force, which began as a Facebook community page in December 2015, is meant to jump-start the lives of newcomers to the Netherlands. Its primary focus is on career development, aiming to link refugees with local residents who are in the same field or profession. More broadly, the community provides an infrastructure, online and in the flesh, to help refugees network their way to internships and jobs relevant to the experience many spent years acquiring or being educated for in their origin countries.

What catalyzed the project was the past couple years’ influx of migrants fleeing from the Syrian Civil War, now going on for a half-decade. According to the Netherlands Immigration and Naturalization Service, in 2015, 27,710 asylum applications were filed from Syria (more than double the 11,595 in 2014 and ten times the 2,673 in 2013).

What—or rather, who—made the project possible was Joost van der Hel, a dry-humored, 37-year-old lawyer who admits he hesitates to talk to the media because he would rather spend time participating in his own initiative than be the face of it. In this regard, Sprudge’s interview setting at Anne & Max—where, as he’s said on Facebook, he likes to “drink a coffee with refugees who also have a legal background”—was advantageous. It helps, too, that Van der Hel lives and works in the neighborhood, which means he also lives and works in the neighborhood of the emergency asylum center on Havenstraat. A five-minute stroll south of the cafe, the Havenstraat accommodation is one of four major facilities in Amsterdam to receive and temporarily house refugees.

Last September, when Van der Hel walked into the dull brick building, which can accommodate up to 400 people, he did not, like many other citizens, bring clothes, toiletries, or food. He brought a question.

“I just sat down and had a chat with a couple guys and said, ‘OK, how can I help you?’” recalls Van der Hel, noting that accountants, a journalist, a writer, a graphic designer, and a salesman were among the refugees he met on that visit. “They said: ‘Well, we are totally bored. We would like to do something. We have no idea, with all the information, where to start, and it’s not easy to meet Dutch people.’”

While the Netherlands has been a relatively hospitable country to refugees, both historically and as far as the Syrian crisis goes, reaching Dutch soil doesn’t automatically grant them asylum status or, subsequently, a residence permit. Asylum applicants spend, at a minimum, six months waiting for a decision. In limbo, they are bounced across reception centers around the country. To Van der Hel, it was obvious how “[during] this period they can at least look on websites, meet people with the same profession, keep stimulated.”

“I was thinking,” he remembers, “how can you match people? And all these guys told me: ‘Well, we don’t have a laptop, but we are all on Facebook. And we all have a smartphone.”’

It then dawned on Van der Hel, a business and intellectual property lawyer who makes a living negotiating between parties, that “a LinkedIn kind of approach but on Facebook” could connect newcomers and locals in a way that is technologically sophisticated enough to lead like-minded people to one another yet non-bureaucratic enough to feel casual and low-pressure.

If he had called on volunteers as mentors or language buddies, “then all the Dutch people would ask me: ‘Yeah, how much time will it cost me, and what do I need to do?’” explains Van der Hel. “So then I thought: “OK, it’s very Dutch to say: ‘Well, let’s do a koppie koffee [“cuppa coffee”].’ And that was the whole idea.”

The whole idea spawned what the Refugee Start Force Facebook community page describes as five “coffee groups,” closed group pages organizing members according to region within the Netherlands, and 15 professional expert groups, which invite members to cluster within their specific fields, such as technical, legal, or medical. The Central group, in which Amsterdam falls, is the largest, with nearly 7,000 members at the time of writing. The groups also coordinate “coffee with a company” events, during which corporations and institutes launch meet-and-greets, premises tours, and talks for refugees.

Anne & Max South began facilitating free drinks for the Refugee Start Force in January, thanks to Steinweg, who around the time had joined the Facebook community. Like Van der Hel, she wanted to help welcome her new neighbors at the Havenstraat asylum center. She remembers speaking with cafe manager Jasmijn van den Thillart, asking: “‘Well, can we organize something? Because there’s so many men there, and I know how much they would like to meet Dutch people, which could be perfectly combined with a good coffee.’”

Little persuading was needed. Besides the tin now holding customers’ suspended coffees, the manager decided to offer two free drinks a day in the name of the project. It’s as simple as a pair telling the staff that they are on a Refugee Start Force coffee date. Van den Thillart enjoys watching old and new Amsterdammers interact.

“They have a conversation or they play chess or they watch something on the iPad,” she says. “I think it’s a great initiative.”

The sentiment is echoed by Menno Simons, founder of Bocca, the Dutch roasting company that supplies Anne & Max with its various filter and espresso beans, including a personalized franchise blend.

“We think it is a great initiative,” Simons tells Sprudge via email. “We are living in a multicultural society in Holland. If people are in need of help or if they feel like having a conversation, coffee is a great facilitator. It is embedded in our own culture, but it also reminds us of the spirit of the Ethiopian coffee ceremony, where friends, family, [and even sometimes] enemies discuss issues or celebrate life.”

By the end of their coffee date, Sam and Steinweg were talking less about the past than the present. Sam related balancing Dutch language and integration classes with job-seeking, his fierce loyalty to AFC Ajax, clubbing with some new international friends, and a preference for beer over coffee—though appreciation of the latter in overcoming too much of the former the next day. Steinweg revealed that, despite her growing family, she had no plans to move away from Amsterdam any time soon. After recently hosting a community sidewalk bench-gathering, she was reminded of how many unexpected interactions with so many likable people that her hometown is conducive to.

Before parting ways that morning, Steinweg invited Sam to see her office in the Teatro Munganga. It would give him the chance to check out what today doubles as a theater and a venue with rentable offices, including room for visitors. The reinvention of a culturally significant building as a combined-purpose spot with shared workspace has been a trend in Amsterdam. Sam—Holland Sam—liked the idea. Speaking in simple Dutch, the pair took off together, walking north.

Karina Hof is a Sprudge staff writer based in Amsterdam. Read more Karina Hof on Sprudge. 

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The eerie grandeur found downtown in the cities of Old Europe is due to the fact that every centimeter is steeped in history. In the Netherlands, it’s a given that a place of contemporary popular appeal—say, a dance club or a boutique hotel—may inhabit a spot with hard-core historical gravitas.

What makes The Village Coffee’s second location in Utrecht, the Netherlands’ fourth-largest city, particularly haunting is that the previous site was in use right up until mid-2014: it was a prison. And although it began functioning as such only in 1856—somewhat recent by European standards—Wolvenplein (“wolves square”), as the property is called today, occupies canal-cradled land in use since 1580, when it was a military bulwark. In other words, discipline and control were the MO on this spot for centuries.

So you may appreciate both the irony and the aptness of the aesthetic to the owners now established on Wolvenplein.

“We like punk rock and metal,” sums up co-owner Angelo Van de Weerd.

Sitting in The Village’s spacious Wolvenplein courtyard among customers enjoying the sun and some hens roaming freely, the inked-up Van de Weerd and partner Lennaert Meijboom are wearing rock Ts (Motörhead and Black Sabbath, respectively) and slim black jeans. Both are warm and smiley, more likely to cuddle a chicken than to bite its head off.

Reflecting on their first location, which opened on nearby Voorstraat in 2011, they acknowledge the role The Village Coffee & Music—so named for its double-life as an espresso bar and small gig venue—took on.

Says Van de Weerd: “There wasn’t really a place for the—I hate the word—‘alternative’ scene to hang out. But when The Village [came to] the Voorstraat, people met each other [there], and it was really cool. That’s how we introduced [that crowd] to good coffee. Via [Wolvenplein] we want to introduce them to good food and good beers, and how you roast coffee.”

In fact, more than anything else, it was room to start roasting that sent them up the river.

“It’s kinda difficult to find a place in Utrecht, in the center, where you can have a [roasting] area and a part that’s a restaurant,” explains Meijboom. “We were searching for more than two years to find a good location for the roastery because we didn’t want to start off in some industrial area.”

In June 2014, Wolvenplein’s last prisoners were transferred to other jails. By June 2015, as nearby spaces were being rented to entrepreneurs and artists, Meijboom and Van de Weerd had set up shop.

Despite the barred windows (a feature left over from the building’s previous life), the cafe feels breezy. A front entrance works with one to the courtyard to provide favorable ventilation. Mid-century modern furniture, properly framed posters, and vases of fresh flowers counter any lingering correctional-facility vibes. The three-group La Marzocco Linea Classic is pure eye candy: customized by Dutch design studio Zink, the Z3 model’s glass panels reveal a powder-coated canary-yellow boiler.

The kitchen, which produces day fare all week and evening victuals on Fridays, uses bread baked in-house and ingredients sourced by blue-ribbon restaurant wholesaler Lindenhoff. Beers on tap include Jailbait Pale Ale, brewed for The Village by fellow Utrechters De Kromme Haring, and vino comes from Margaret Wines, a local supplier favoring small, traditional vineyards.

A separate room, described by Meijboom as the former prison’s management center, is where the magic happens. Van de Weerd roasts on a Probat UG15 from 1955, with sample roasts coming through a smaller, self-restored “old Probat, also 1950-something,” he says. Barstools invite visitors to sit and watch, while they in turn are watched by the wizard on the facing wall’s mural.

The Village serves its own roasts in all three of its locations—an espresso bar opened on the Utrecht Science Park university campus this past December—as well as distributing to businesses across town. At Wolvenplein, a pair of Anfim Super Caimano grinders stand at the ready, whether for the Outsider, a blend of 75 percent Colombian and 25 percent Ethiopian coffees; the Renegade, a blend of 50 percent Brazilian and 25 percent each Colombian and Ethiopian; or one of the weekly filter coffees or single-origin espressos.

Meijboom and Van de Weerd, now in their 30s, grew up in Wijk bij Duurstede, a town with the Netherlands’ only drive-through windmill. They connected over music and at festivals, which they attended at first just as fans; eventually, they began working at them, selling coffee and sharpening their skills. By 2008 they found themselves as spectators at the World Barista Championship in Copenhagen. “We started being really serious about coffee,” Meijboom recalls. A year later, Van de Weerd came in fourth at the Dutch Barista Championship.

Planning to hit nine of them this summer alone, music festivals remain important to The Village duo. Nowadays, though, the friends also attend to pursue their living, building up an espresso bar at nearly every location. When not on tour, they often can be found hosting movie nights and air-hockey matches at Wolvenplein or programming punk shows at music venue EKKO.

 Lennaert Meijboom and Angelo Van de Weerd 

Yet for all that activity, The Village has no plans to become an empire.

“We’re not really [doing it] to expand a lot. We just want to do stuff that feels good, do cool things,” says Van de Weerd. “Sometimes something pops up, [like] people ask you: ‘Oh yeah, do you want to open a bar in a prison?’ And we’re like: ‘All right, let’s do it!’ But we don’t want 20 Villages.”

Besides, Meijboom and Van de Weerd are now doing everything they ever wanted as coffee professionals. What’s more, they get to operate within a property where thick bars still line the central hall’s cell-stacked atrium and the solitary confinement spaces, not exactly scrubbed clean, were obviously very much occupied. It doesn’t get much more heavy metal than that.

Karina Hof is a Sprudge staff writer based in Amsterdam. Read more Karina Hof on Sprudge. 

The post Heavy Metal Coffee In An Old Dutch Prison At The Village Wolvenplein appeared first on Sprudge.

Over two weeks in June 2016, Sprudge founders Jordan Michelman and Zachary Carlsen embarked on a far-flung coffee podcast tour of Europe, taping episodes of the Coffee Sprudgecast in four different cities. Our shows to date have been in Dublin, Paris, and Berlin—gems, these shows—and we’re capping this off this week with our final episode of the tour, taped at the Scandinavian Embassy in Amsterdam.

Cerianne Bury

This place is easily one of our favorite coffee bars in the world, and we filled it up with good wine, friendly people, and a set of guests that prove why Amsterdam is such an exciting coffee hub.

Stijn Braas

Sign up now as a subscriber to the Coffee Sprudgecast and never miss an episode. The Coffee Sprudgecast European Tour is sponsored by La Marzocco, Cafe Imports Europe, and KitchenAid USA craft coffee equipment.

Karina Hof

Guests for this show included Cerianne Bury, a green coffee trader and Re:Co Symposium speaker; Stijn Braas of Coffee Company, the venerable Dutch chain with coffee bars across the city; Rikard Andersson, the chef and co-founder at Scandinavian Embassy; and Karina Hof, a Sprudge staff writer based in Amsterdam.

Rikard Andersson

Join us, won’t you? This was a warm and intimate evening in a truly special space, and we’ll remember it forever. See you at Glou Glou for the afterparty (and then Cafe Van Wou).

Listen and subscribe and review The Coffee Sprudgecast on iTunes!

Visit The Coffee Sprudgecast feed here.

The post The Coffee Sprudgecast European Tour: Live From Amsterdam appeared first on Sprudge.

Keen Coffee, a coffee roaster out of the Netherlands, is making a splash in the coffee world as it nears its one-year anniversary. In March, the company debuted their packaging at the Amsterdam Coffee Festival. Bold colors complement striking line-art. Coffees are distinguished by clever accent colors on the sides of the flat bottom bag. Very nice.

As told to Sprudge by Rob Kerkhoff.

Tell us a bit about yourself and your company.

Keen Coffee is a collaboration of baristas Bonne Postma and Rob Kerkhoff, and roasters Jan Schuitemaker and Tosca Schuitemaker. Together, we have over 40 years of experience working in the world of coffee.

Last year, we decided to combine forces and, after much brainstorming, Keen Coffee was born on December 1st of 2015. Keen launched publicly at the Amsterdam Coffee Festival in March of 2016, and we couldn’t have asked for a better kickoff!

The Keen roastery is located in Enkhuizen, a small harbour town just North of Amsterdam, where all of our coffees are roasted to order using a 30 kg Loring roaster. We also give lessons at our roastery, sharing our knowledge of green coffee purchasing, roasting, coffee preparation, and hospitality.

For us at Keen Coffee, discovering new ways to experience coffee is what excites us; sharing these discoveries is what keeps us inspired.

When did the coffee package design debut? 

Our coffee package design debuted when we launched our company Keen Coffee in March at the 2016 Amsterdam Coffee Festival. We were introducing our brand on a huge stage, so we knew that we wanted to launch with our own unique package design—not just another brown bag with a white label slapped on!

The package is your coffee’s calling card. Its design is what lures people in, to smell and then taste the coffee housed inside.

In August of this year, we introduced a second bag design that is a simple variation on the first. This new bag has a purple edge, instead of the original blue, to indicate that the beans are for espresso not filter coffee. We love how good design can make it so easy for our customer to see which bag they should grab.

Who designed the package? 

Our good friend and designer, Jorgen Koolwijk (Uncoated Print Club), designed our logo, our corporate identity, and our coffee packaging. Jorgen specializes in designing for music, theater, and festival-related businesses, so we knew that he’d be coming to this project with an outsider’s eye, which we liked. And we just plain love his style!

Please describe the look in your own words!

We asked Jorgen for a design that was both striking and innovative and then gave him full creative control. He was inspired by mineral formations and their characteristic crystalline shape. This approach resonates with us because we love the idea of something so crude and rough transforming into something beautiful. The central image on our packaging is based on a single piece of quartz, the lines jutting out from it are inspired by quartz formations, and both were hand-drawn by Jorgen.

The iridescence of the lines featured along the sides of the bag, the front logo, and the small crystal drawing on the package’s back valve, give the design more depth. The rich purple and blue colors work to differentiate our coffee bag and make it truly unique.

We also wanted to get our message just right, so we employed our Canadian friend, Samara Parker, to create copy for our packaging that perfectly captured our values and the playfulness of our brand.

But we weren’t only thinking about branding details when designing our packaging, we were also thinking about our fellow baristas and how we could make things easier for them. We wanted our packaging to be functional as well as beautiful, so we included an easy-to-use zipper top and laser scoring to make opening easy and prevent tearing.

As the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe once said, “God is in the details.” We try to apply this way of thinking to everything we do, from the design of our packaging, to our bean selection, to our roasting methods!

What coffee information do you share on the package? What’s the motivation behind that?

We made a conscious choice to lead with the name of the plantation or farm where the beans are grown, instead of their country of origin. This was an important choice for us, as we often carry coffees that come from the same country, but taste nothing alike. Below the farm, we provide more details about the beans, at first the country of origin, the region or mill they’re from, the altitude at which they were grown, the variety of beans, the process method and the date on which they were roasted.

Of course, we also mention basic information such as roasting style (filter or espresso), and quantity (500 grams for espresso and 350 grams for filter) on the label.

Our website, keencoffee.com, includes more extensive stories about each of our coffees and information—for example, how Jan found our direct trade coffee Jaguara from Brazil.

Where is the bag manufactured?

We use a local company (Dutch Coffee Pack) as our supplier, but the bags are made in their Chinese production location.

For package nerds, what *type of package* is it? (hand pressed, one-way valve, what’s it lined with, etc.)

We use a box pouch with a zipper to make the bags resealable, a one-way degassing valve, and laser scoring for easy opening. We also use a custom-made shape that makes the bags look full whether they’re holding 500 grams of beans or 350 grams of beans because empty-looking coffee bags give us the sads. The outer layer of the bags is finished with a matte varnish which gives them a really luxe feel and makes the artwork even more playful.

Is the package recyclable? Any other pro-environment info about the package you want to share?

The materials used for our packages are 100% high oxygen barrier plastic which makes the bags recyclable with plastic waste in most European countries. The inner layer is a dense white film to keep as much UV light out of the bags as possible and ensure the freshness of the beans.

Nice Package is a feature series by Zachary Carlsen on Sprudge. Gaze upon more Nice Packages here.

The post Nice Package: Keen Coffee in Enkhuizen, The Netherlands appeared first on Sprudge.

Observers of exports in European carbohydrate exotica will have noticed that the stroopwafel is now a specialty food staple. From Starbucks counters to Delta tray tables, from a cafe in Portland to a bakery in Brooklyn, that griddled disc of flour and syrup the Dutch have fashioned—essentially as an edible lid made tastily treacly when placed atop a steaming cup—is within the masses’ reach. Not that the stroopwafel has jumped the shark. It remains an ideal match for coffee, as Sprudge reported years ago. But if you’re looking to expand your repertoire, you should take note of these four quintessential Dutch delights, all of which are, whaddaya know, coffee-flavored.

Hagelslag

Americans would call them “sprinkles” and eat them on ice cream. But in the Netherlands, these little rods of chocolate confection are beloved bread bedazzlers. Less waxy than their transatlantic cousins, they often appear on toast made sticky with butter or peanut butter. The name “hagelslag” derives from the Dutch word for “hail” because, says one theory, an Amsterdam inventor thought them up on a frozen-rain-ridden day in 1919. In 2012, De Ruijter, the Netherlands’ longtime producer of broodbeleg (“bread toppings”), introduced its Koffie-Puur hagelslag. With no actual coffee listed among its ingredients, this won’t be a substitute for breakfast-time caffeine, but the “natural flavoring” that comes through is by all means mocha.

Hopjes

These hard candies are said to date back to 1792, taking their title from Baron Hendrik Hop of The Hague. According to Cloetta, their present-day Swedish manufacturer, Hop was a hardcore coffee fan not only because the drink honeyed his tongue for politicking at local coffeehouses, but because it was reportedly good for his gout. One morning, on retrieving his cup from alongside the fireplace, Hop found that the remainder of the prior night’s coffee, mixed as usual with rum and sugar, had become a thick mass—and he liked it! He headed to the nearest confectioner and requested coffee-flavored bonbons be made. And over two centuries later, “natural coffee flavoring (containing 0.2% coffee extract)” is in fact cited on bags of Rademaker Haagsche Hopjes. In the 1990s, The Hague even had a museum devoted solely to the little suckers.

Hopjes vla

Knowing the history of “hopje”—today also simply a noun in the Dutch dictionary for a coffee-flavored candy—you can readily appreciate the cultural idiosyncrasy that is hopjes vla. But what is “vla”? This coagulated dessert akin to custard was once so precious it compelled the Dutch to adopt into their kitchen toolset the flessenlikker (literally “bottle licker”), a wand with a semi-circle-shaped tip to collect those bottom-dwelling dollops. Hopjes vla, unlike its namesake sweets, does not include coffee extract in its ingredients, and yet many who do dairy say ja to this very vla.

Kruidnoten

Kruidnoten herald Sinterklaas, the Dutch holiday protagonist inspired by Saint Nicholas, whose feast day is celebrated each year on December 5. The single bite-size speculaas cookies are crunchier than their anise-seasoned sister kibble, pepernoten, and sometimes come chocolate-covered. Lately, they have begun showing up with more mature shellacs. Irish Coffee and Cappuccino varieties are made by Van Delft, which has been “Sinterklaas’ main supplier” since 1880, claims the company. Neither contains coffee (nor whiskey), and their marbleized taupe exteriors rather evoke mushroom caps, but their taste—of spices (“kruiden”) and giddy-making amounts of sugar—do yell Yuletide. A Cappuccino Crunch version has been on the market since last year courtesy of Dutch discount retailer HEMA, which now has branches across the Benelux, Germany, the UK, Spain, and France. So if there’s one thing that’s certain: cappuccino kruidnoten are creeping. Soon you may find them, among other Dutch coffee-flavored treats, in your own cupboard.

Karina Hof is a Sprudge staff writer based in Amsterdam. Read more Karina Hof on Sprudge. 

The post Dutch Treats: The Many Coffee Candies Of The Netherlands appeared first on Sprudge.

Edward Beumer (left) and Erik Oosterhuis at Trakteren.

A friend who once taught English to KLM flight attendants found them exceptionally wide-eyed and eager, perhaps because most were in the very job they had wanted since they were little. So whenever I spot one of their silhouettes around Amsterdam—neatly coiffed, full-length swing coat creating a serene azure aura—I imagine that satisfaction of fulfilling a childhood occupational dream. It is easy to think the same about cafe owners whose command of the espresso bar is so strong and steadfast it appears to be the manifestation of some long-destined reality. But the truth is that is seldom the case in this new world of new wave coffee. No matter: as the founders of Trakteren in Amsterdam West have proved, dedication in the here and now makes up for not being born with a cupping spoon in hand.

For Edward Beumer and Erik Oosterhuis, Trakteren’s owners, 2016 has been a banner year. In March, Beumer won the Dutch AeroPress Championship. It was a precious-metallic leap from Oosterhuis’s 2014 bronze trophy in the same competition, and a prelude to Beumer’s “not too shabby” fourth-place finish at the internationals in Dublin in June. That same month, Trakteren turned five, which is not only considerably old in the Netherlands’ nascent specialty coffee scene, but also a major benchmark for its celebrants, relative newcomers to the business.

Lately, customers’ orders have been for Beumer’s high-dose/short-extraction AeroPress, but Trakteren first became known for its global array of private label, single-origin coffees—today offering about a dozen roasted by Dutch Barista Coffee—loose-leaf teas, and chocolates. The shop’s name, after all, is a Dutch verb meaning “to treat.” Serving some of the most refined latte art in town, Trakteren has also become a destination for the shutterbugs of social media. “People come in and say: ‘I don’t care what I drink. I want a bear,’ ” says Oosterhuis good-naturedly.

Beumer pours while Oosterhuis works up to a smize.

But to gain such multifaceted customer appreciation, Trakteren has been bullish, not bearish. When “the whole idea started in April 2010,” as they say, the two lifelong friends were in similar career ruts. Oosterhuis disliked being a traveling salesman, but marketing porcelain and gift items across the country opened his eyes to a trend: mixed retail and horeca shops that gave patrons a place to sit and sip the products they were buying.

“All the customers, they’d come and get a coffee and [experience how] there it was really different, much better. So I got a bit interested in coffee, and came to like these places too,” recalls Oosterhuis. He reported his observations to Beumer, who in the meantime had been convinced by finance-sector vending machines that all coffee was undrinkable. Soon, though, his opinion changed.

Attending the Beleef Koffie Beurs, a May 2010 industry expo in Utrecht, was transformative. They cite two master classes as “the foundations of what we are doing right now”: a course by 2009 World Latte Art champion Peter Hernou and an espresso bar startup session by Rob Berghmans, the owner of Caffènation in Antwerp, who came to advise Trakteren long-term on “basically everything.”

Visiting the expo’s Boot stand was “the moment that really opened our eyes,” says Beumer of tasting the brand’s famous Panamanian coffee. “It was so rich and it was so full and it was so strong.”

But the pair were also put in their place. The elder Boot brother “was seeing right through us,” Beumer remembers with pained laughter. “Have you ever held a portafilter?” Barend Boot asked them. “We’re like, ‘Yeah, sure.’ But we’d never touched a portafilter.”

To the victors, the spoils.

“Desperately trying to make up for not having experience” is what sent Beumer and Oosterhuis scouting the Netherlands’ best cafes. For months, their routine was to walk into a venue, talk to the proprietor for an hour, and record the conversation—then go home, play back the audio, type up key points, print, review, and file. Their folder of notes traveled with them.

What some of us think life in Amsterdam is always like (i.e., amazing).

Trakteren is open six days a week. There are no other baristas on staff to help maneuver the three-group La Marzocco Linea Classic, various filter apparatuses, and grinders including an Anfim Super Caimano On-Demand couplet, a Mazzer Super Jolly, and a Mahlkönig Kenia.

Still, these are sympathetic barmen, Oosterhuis with a Neil Young-esque quiet intensity and Beumer with his wry smize. “You really have a social function in these neighborhoods,” says Beumer, reflecting on one aspect of the work for which they received no training. “You really get involved with people’s lives. If they have happy moments, they share them with you. And then they have some not-so-happy moments they also share.”

Trakteren: both organized and cluttered.

Minutes after winning the Dutch AeroPress Championship, Beumer told me he and Oosterhuis, who competed that night as well, “gave it a little extra” in order “to set a good example” for a couple of Trakteren customers, Hicham Batou and Shaddy Mirza—hitherto coffee laymen who not only trained with the Trakteren duo, but did them proud by participating in the contest and making it to the second round.

Edward Beumer competing at the Dutch AeroPress Championship this year. To his right is Hicham Batou—a Trakteren customer who made it into the second round.

Despite their success, Beumer and Oosterhuis aren’t complacent—both feel they have ’Pressing prowess yet to prove in 2017—though nowadays they are more often the guides than the guided. According to some of their regulars, Trakteren has even inspired the addition of a profession to the local when-I-grow-up wish list.

“We heard this weekend that there are children in the neighborhood who are role-playing as de koffie jongens—‘the coffee boys,’ ” says Beumer, smizing a lot.

Also obviously touched, Oosterhuis mimics a child: “Now I’m Edward. We’re gonna make coffee…”

Karina Hof is a Sprudge staff writer based in Amsterdam. Read more Karina Hof on Sprudge. 

The post The Spoils Of Work: Dedication & Success At Trakteren In Amsterdam appeared first on Sprudge.

You may remember from social studies class that it was the Dutch who first brought coffee to Europe in quantity. But did you also know of the pivotal role Amsterdam played in coffee’s circulation not just on the Continent but around the world? I only learned this once I was living a bike ride away from what turns out is the plant’s historical hotbed: Hortus, the botanical garden of the Dutch capital.

On a warm afternoon, when the hollyhocks were nearing their last blooms, I visited Hortus to get more information. Reinout Havinga, Head of Garden and Collections, had much to share about the commodity’s westward proliferation and, before that, its bottleneck in Amsterdam. Here are five takeaways that you, too, might like to hold onto.

Reinout Havinga with one of the coffee plants at Hortus.

1) It was a whole 310 years ago that the traders of the Dutch East India Company managed to transport coffee from the Dutch colony of Java to the Netherlands. After what must have been a long, arduous sail, the plant wound up in Amsterdam, where it was cultivated in a hothouse, probably the best bet for re-creating the tropical monsoon climate in which coffee thrives. Compared to other major cities’ botanical exhibitions, the offerings at Hortus are modest. However, the raison d’être for its creation was vital: in 1638, the mayor established it as an herb garden for doctors and apothecaries seeking to save the city from a plague epidemic.

2) Hortus has no placard pointing out precisely where on the premises the first Amsterdam-grown coffee took root (something like the “Where Harry Met Sally…” sign at Katz’s Deli in New York City). Still, admirers of Coffea arabica can cozy right up to the modern-day species. In the Butterfly House, Havinga introduced me to a shrub so shiny-leafed and strapping, I wondered if it might grow right through the glass ceiling. Nearby, in the jungle-esque verdancy of the Three Climate Greenhouse, a smaller shrub appeared less glossy, though hearty enough in the partly shaded understory.

In the Butterfly House.

3) So is one of these star-turn bushes actual progeny of the Javan export from three centuries ago? Probably. “We know what happened with the coffee plant around 1700 in this garden, but we don’t know if the plant stayed here, alive in this garden, and it’s actually quite unlikely that it survived the ages here,” said Havinga. In fact, these days Hortus gets its coffee plants from a local nursery. However, Havinga says research shows that “any coffee plant that you find in cultures somewhere in Europe is likely to be a descendant of the coffee plant that moved through the Hortus,” which would imply that any coffee plant now found at Hortus “is a descendant of the [original] Amsterdam plant.” Venturing further back, he says, “It’s the most likely explanation for any coffee plant [presently] in the world: that it descended from the large plantations that started in the 19th century in Brazil. So it is quite likely that our [current] plant is coming from Brazil or from [another] coffee culture in the world and is a descendent of the Amsterdam plant—not that it survived here all the centuries, but that it survived in the tropics.”

It’s nice to think of this as one of the most important coffee locations in the world.

4) As to how coffee got from Eastern to Western hemispheres, there are at least two different versions of the story. “One is that it was brought to Suriname by the Dutch themselves, and from Suriname to French Guiana, and then there was a Brazilian interference that took the plant to Brazil,” explained Havinga. “But the other one, the story you hear most often, is that it was given in a bouquet to Louis XIV.” Incorporated in Hortus signage and corroborated by various international sources (Mark Pendergrast’s scholarly tome included), this account cites passage of the plant from Dutch to French hands in 1714. From there, coffee was shipped on to France’s colonies in and along the Caribbean and, eventually, Brazil.

Een Sieraad Voor De Stad book

5) Finally, Hortus staff experimented with roasting and brewing the coffee beans that grew at their place of employment. According to “Een Sieraad Voor De Stad: De Amsterdamse Hortus Botanicus 1638-1993” (“A Jewel For The City: The Amsterdam Hortus Botanical Garden 1638-1993”), a book that chronicles the garden’s history, the first recorded incident of such seed-to-sip DIY coffee was in 1710. Hortus’s current plants do flower, but the fruits have not been plentiful enough for a meaningful yield, said Havinga, adding “It would, of course, be fun to harvest and grind our own coffee, but we never did so. We had a cacao bean, though, a couple years ago, which tasted very good.”

Karina Hof is a Sprudge staff writer based in Amsterdam. Read more Karina Hof on Sprudge. 

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The Netherlands’ annual coffeepalooza filled factory-turned-funhouse Westergasfabriek back in March 2017. Part trade show and part barista tournament, the 2017 Amsterdam Coffee Festival had plenty of comeback stands, brands, and old hands. Yet this year also seemed to offer better gender balance among participants, even more international visitors, and an officialized partnership between coffee and cocktails via the debut Mixologists competition (look for more coverage soon!)

1) Brewers Cup Championship

The first Dutch coffee contest winner for 2017 was… a Swede. Daniella Nyström is best known in these parts as a spritely barista and expert fermenter at Amsterdam cafe Scandinavian Embassy. For the title of Dutch Brewers Cup Champion, she used a washed Ethiopian Kochere roasted by Coffee Collective in Denmark. Skål!

2) Cup Tasters Championship

The book of Esther is full of awards and distinctions—including that of four-time national latte art champion—though this time Esther Maasdam was crowned Dutch Cup Tasters Champion. She was one of 32 contenders, and the final round was a nail-biter, with the fire engine-red manicured victress beating Laurent L’Ortye by only one correct guess.

3) Jar Coffea

Glass terrariums are hardly conducive to flying off shelves, but Amsterdam design firm Pikaplant seemed to have no struggle selling its Jar Coffea. The hermetically sealed biotope contains a single specimen of coffee—it’s eye-catching and self-watering!

4) Back To Black

Just over a year since their roasting operation began, Back to Black has, contrary to the Winehouse lyrics, not found its odds are stacked. The Amsterdam cafe was showcasing co-owner and roaster Inge Bulthuis’ varied output, now prolific enough to necessitate a new second location. Meanwhile on the competition floor, barista Sybilla Jimmink won the 2017 Louis Claus Award for local coffee industry up-and-comer.

5) Dutch Hand Coffee Grinding Championship

Stooker Roasting Co was so stoked about the Orphan Espresso LIDO 3, they hosted a hand coffee grinding contest to award one to the fastest pulverizer of 30 grams of a Kenyan Kangocho peaberry. The winner came in at 25.14 seconds.

6) Barista Championship

With characteristic warmth and humility, quadruple Irish barista champ Colin Harmon conferred the 2017 Dutch Barista Champion trophy onto Merijn Gijsbers. The freelancer from Eindhoven, who works under the name het Koffiegenootschap, came in sixth in the same competition last year. He thanked his coaches Ben Morrow and Esther Maasdam for helping him make the jump and roasting the Panamanian La Berlina Geisha that did the job.

7) JADE cups

From afar, they could be cupping bowls. On closer look, the white porcelain JADE cups designed by Eindhoven-based product developer Maarten Baptist appeared in three sizes and showed striking details: a two-tone Twizzler-effect band, a single polka dot, or words parsed from a, let’s say, coffee koan.

8) Tea Jam 

Kiona Malinka kept an audience rapt during her Tea Jam, a 30-minute riff on Chinese and Japanese tea cultures and how they contrast with today’s Dutch drinking practices. A remarkably attentive little boy delighted in the comparison of his jacket’s color with that of her matcha bowl. Malinka’s Crusio Tea is headquartered in Bergen op Zoom, but the brand’s classy cylinders can be spotted at specialty cafes around the country.

9) Latte Art Championship

Winning this year’s Dutch Latte Art Championship marked a trifecta for Nick Vink, who works at restaurant H32 in Oss. Like the Netherlands’ new number one barista, Vink hails from the province of North Brabant, also famously home to Kees van der Westen and the Bossche bol.

10) Holy Cannoli

It was impossible not to smile at the pink banner reading: “We understand—coffee first! But can we just say cannoli second?” The reference was to a Dutch-created video knocking American exceptionalism that went viral after the US presidential inauguration and spawned copycat clips across the Schengen Area. And turns out, the cream-filled tube-shaped pastries that Dutch company Cannoli sells B2B are tasty, too. Viva l’Olanda!

Karina Hof is a Sprudge staff writer based in Amsterdam. Read more Karina Hof on Sprudge. 

The post 10 Memorable Moments From The Amsterdam Coffee Festival appeared first on Sprudge.

As the full moon rose over Amsterdam’s Westergasfabriek, a washed Rwandan bourbon ebbed and flowed in the cylinders of 36 coffee professionals vying for the title of Dutch AeroPress Champion 2017. But it was Jonatan Scheeper who waxed triumphant, winning the gold Alan Adler-autographed trophy.

Scheeper works at Single Estate Coffee Roasters in Maasdijk, though Amsterdammers first got to know him at Headfirst, the espresso bar and micro-roaster he co-owned with 2016 Dutch barista champion Lex Wenneker until its closure in 2015.

Round by round, as MCs Kim Staalman and Gabriel Dunn announced his wins, Scheeper appeared nonplussed. “What? Who, me?” his face seemed to say even into the finals. In the last heat, he out-pressed Milad Ferough, from Coffeecompany Vismarkt in Utrecht, and Erik Oosterhuis, a 2014 third place Dutch AeroPress titleholder and one half of Amsterdam cafe Trakteren—2016 Dutch AeroPress champ Edward Beumer being the other half.

Standing alongside the oversized coupon guaranteeing his ticket to Seoul for the World AeroPress Championship, Scheeper told Sprudge: “I love making AeroPresses, but… I didn’t think I could win it. I tried the coffee and I made a recipe—I thought it was nice—but this was really unexpected.”

Although for years, event organizers Coffeecompany held the contest at their Oosterdok flagship store, this sixth edition took place in the Machinegebouw. Poster designer Stefan Glerum’s Easter egg-toned steampunk lettering befit the building, once the pumping headquarters of Amsterdam’s 19th-century gas factory. The venue provided room to breath—and to breakdance, as came to pass while judges took five for final deliberations. Presiding were Will Corby of Pact Coffee, Stuart Ritson of Cafe Imports Europe, and Mikaela Wallgren of The Coffee Collective.

March 11 occasioned a first collaboration between Coffeecompany and local brewery Troost in producing a coffee IPA, made with a Kagumoini SL28 and 34. But it also marked the final Dutch AeroPress Championship that Coffeecompany’s beloved, blazered Stijn Braas would host before leaving his decade-long employer.

Many contenders and supporters wore cafe logo-ed apparel, with Back to Black, Black Gold, The Village, and Versace White Label featuring prominently. One reading of Bert van Wassenhove’s bomber jacket with patch letters spelling “PATAT” was snackwave-chic; another was the sartorial working-through of a collective fear that potato-taste defect could surface in the competition coffee. But no such reports came of the Coffeecompany-roasted beans from award-winning Muyongwe washing station.

Other participants included heavy-hitters from the Low Countries specialty coffee industry. Neither Wenneker nor his brother, Bob Wenneker, himself a 2014 second place Dutch AeroPress titleholder, got past the initial round, but that freed them to cheer Scheeper. Beumer did not advance either, but he shook it off, appearing to transition instantaneously from Oosterhuis’ fellow competitor to his personal Cruyff. Despite remarkable dexterity with two AeroPresses, defeat came early to Cerianne Bury, a quality coordinator at Trabocca and an astute sociocultural analyst of barista competitions. While Bocca roaster Ben Richardson, last year’s bronze medalist in the same contest, reached the semifinals, he had to stop there—though not without giving a quick kiss to Scheeper’s forearm, mid-press. It was impish and tender and clearly lucky.

The winning recipes

First place: Jonatan Scheeper, Single Estate Coffee Roasters

Coffee: 19 grams

Grind: Mahlkönig EK 43, setting 9

Water: 240 grams

Filter: 2x AeroPress filter

Place filter in filter holder and rinse with hot water

Heat water to 70 degrees Celsius

Use AeroPress right-side up and place on preheated server

Add ground coffee to the AeroPress

Start timer and pour all the water in 15 seconds

Stir 4 times in about 15 seconds

Place plunger on the AeroPress at an angle and pull for a millimeter to make sure no water runs through

Leave for 30 seconds, when the timer hits 1 minute, press for 40 seconds and stop before the hissing noise

Pour into a non-heated cup

Second place: Milad Feroegh, Coffeecompany

Coffee: 23 grams (after picking), 18.5 grams after sieving

Grind: Rhinowares hand grinder, 12 clicks coarser than the finest setting

Water: 250 grams Spa Reine (25 grams at room temperature, 225 grams at 88 degrees Celsius)

Filter: 1x AeroPress filter

Grind coffee in a Rhinowares hand grinder

Sift fines with a FORLIFE tea infuser

Pour 25 grams of Spa Reine at room temperature in inverted AeroPress

Add 18.5 grams of coffee

Pour 50 grams of water at 88 degrees Celsius for a 30-second bloom

Add remaining 175 grams of water

Stir twice

Flip at 1 minute 20 seconds and press in 40 seconds in a non-heated cup

3rd Place: Erik Oosterhuis, Trakteren

Coffee: 33 grams

Grind: EK 43 setting 10.25

Water: 80 grams Icelandic Glacial

Filter: 1x AeroPress filter

Use AeroPress right-side up

Add coffee

Pour 80 grams of water at 50 degrees Celsius and bloom for 40 seconds

Stir 1 time

Press as quickly as possible

Dilute with 120 grams of water at 70 degrees Celsius

Karina Hof is a Sprudge staff writer based in Amsterdam. Read more Karina Hof on Sprudge. 

Photos by Jasper Uhlenbusch and Karina Hof.

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When news broke that a Coffee Mixologists competition would debut at the 2017 Amsterdam Coffee Festival, we could have guessed the winning duo would be half barista wunderkind and half cocktailer extraordinaire. It was a surprise, though, that the champions were not just partners-in-spirits, but spiritual partners too.

In fact, Rita Balrak, working in coffee for nearly a decade, and Sven Brokaar, a bartender at Rotterdam’s The Stirr, which he and two friends launched in early 2016, had become engaged only weeks before entering the competition.

Sponsored by Tia Maria and Amsterdam roaster Lot Sixty One, the contest selected 16 teams from around the world to mixologize live before the festival audience and judges. Presiding were Anne Lunell of Sweden’s Koppi, Patrik Rolf Karlsson of April Coffee in Copenhagen, and Hani Asfdaai, owner of Rotterdam bar and restaurant Noah.

A caraway-infused tamarind espresso fizz is what got Balrak and Brokaar to the top. In the finals, by a mere half-point, they beat fellow Rotterdammers Rob Clarijs of De Zeeuwse Branding and Alberto Matallana of Barrelproof.

At Rotterdam cafe NOC NOC, where Balrak works part time, the winning couple spoke to Sprudge about coffee and cocktails—and what sweet bedfellows they make. With chemistry that makes Kunis-Kutcher cuteness and Knowles-Carter synergy pale in comparison, they also talked about Conceptum. Their recently established company aims to apply Balrak’s degree in architecture and Brokaar’s in sociology to help clients conceptualize and create well-designed venues in horeca.

Sprudge readers in London can catch Balrak and Brokaar creating their winning drink at the London Coffee Festival. They’ll be presenting a session at The Lab on Sunday April 9th, 12pm, titled “When Barista Meets Bartender.”

What made you enter the competition?

Rita Balrak: Actually, a friend of ours tagged us in the post on Facebook. It was somewhere in November that we saw the post, and in September we had gotten engaged.

Sven Brokaar: We thought they wouldn’t forgive us if we didn’t enter the competition because we’re a bartender-barista couple.

Was the experience what you expected?

Balrak: No, not at all! I got so nervous every round, with the microphone and the spotlight. I didn’t expect it to be that big—it was really a crowd.

Brokaar: When we entered we were like, “Oh, we have a shot at winning this,” because we thought it was a Dutch competition. And we said, “Well, there’s gonna be a couple guys from Amsterdam, a couple guys from smaller cities.” But when we saw the whole thing we’re like, “OK, that’s a lot more countries than the Netherlands!” We couldn’t taste all the drinks that everybody made, but we saw how they were made, and I was impressed.

Tell us about the drink that won you the competition.

Brokaar: The final drink that was judged was a rum-tamarind-coffee fizz.

Balrak: So we had espresso infused with caraway seeds, tamarind syrup Sven made at home, Tia Maria, and the coffee bitters that we made in the video.

Brokaar: Topped with a soda—

Balrak: —using egg white. Then we added crazy garnish because we had brought everything, including some flowers we bought at the station.

Do you mean you bought flowers at a train station?

Balrak: Yeah we did. Amsterdam, Central Station.

Brokaar: That’s also something we do at Stirr. We used to buy edible flowers to garnish drinks, but nobody ever ate them because they taste exactly like non-edible flowers. This was really quite expensive—it’s like four euros for a little box—so we thought: let’s just buy normal flowers. But since we started buying normal flowers, everybody started asking: can we eat them?

Two rounds required you to make a “new, innovative coffee-based cocktail” from ingredients in a mystery box. How’d that go?

Balrak: We had 15 minutes. We had to use a minimum of two ingredients from the mystery box. And we couldn’t add anything of our own. We had to use just what was in the pantry.

Brokaar: In one of those rounds, the mystery box was the herb garden, which included basil, bay leaf, ginger, lemongrass, and mint. We settled on espresso because there was time pressure, and you can use espresso in many different ways—in combination with chocolate as an ingredient, but also in combination with something fresh.

Balrak: If we would have gotten chocolate, cream, and milk in the mystery box, we knew that filter coffee would just get lost in there.

Brokaar: It was a matter of improvisation, but at Stirr we work without a menu. Improvisation is our daily, weekly routine, so we had some experience-based advantage in this regard at the competition.

How did you develop your signature drink, the one seen in your competition application video?

Balrak: We e-mailed Five Elephant, and they sent us some beans to try. We liked the Kenya Kamwangi, it was so sweet—blueberries—so that’s why we used it. I thought it was important to show everything we’ve got, like different techniques in coffee, all the stuff that Sven makes himself at Stirr. So based on the coffee, we thought of things to add. I wanted to make bitters in the syphon, and Sven wanted to make some syrup and a puree.

Brokaar: We added blueberries to accentuate the blueberry notes in the coffee. Then we added a fig and plum syrup to give it some more body, and then a little bit of mescal.

And the name?

Balrak: Cafe Mulata. Yeah, that was just Mexican slang for a mix of black and white, and we thought it was funny. We are a mix of black and white. The cocktail was coffee with white mescal—

Brokaar: —and it was also a bit brown. That’s the thing with coffee, you get brown cocktails.

After this experience, do you see a brighter future for coffee cocktails?

Brokaar: The gap between coffee and cocktails is narrowing a little bit. Still, even today a lot of bartenders drink really shitty coffee—it’s just the reality of nighttime hospitality. Usually the espresso machines are bad. It’s changing, it’s getting better, but to make a good coffee, you need a good espresso machine in your cocktail bar, or you need to make filter coffee.

Balrak: The cocktails we made in the different rounds, most of them were based on filter. So that’s an easy way to introduce coffee in different cocktail bars, where they don’t need an espresso machine that costs a couple thousand dollars.

What does the future hold for you?

Balrak: We really wanna have a baby, we wanna have a lot of babies, so that’s the main focus for now. And to get our business started. We really want the first project to happen this year.

Brokaar: We definitely want to keep working in hospitality kinds of things, but not necessarily behind the bar. As far as our company Conceptum goes, we have a lot to offer in terms of practical experience. For example, we sometimes notice, at a place that’s just been opened, little things that show the people who created the concept have not worked behind the bar or behind the coffee machine.

Balrak: Or, when we are working somewhere, we notice some difficulties at the bar.

Brokaar: Usually the best bars are built by bartenders, and the best coffee bars are—

Balrak: —built by baristas.

Karina Hof is a Sprudge staff writer based in Amsterdam. Read more Karina Hof on Sprudge. 

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Roasting is no new business to the Netherlands. Corporate narratives of the country’s coffee behemoths—Douwe Egberts, Simon Lévelt, to name a couple—take pride in their centuries-long practice of the process. As a child in the 1920s, Alfred Peet, founder of Peet’s Coffee, learned about the trade when his father would cup at the kitchen table using samples from his roasting shop in Alkmaar. Heck, the first Starbucks roasting plant to open outside the United States in 2002 was in Amsterdam’s harbor.

What is new in the Netherlands, however, is a flourishing of specialty coffee micro-roasters. Many are run by veteran industry professionals who double as baristas and business owners. Sprudge has already reported on Sweet Cup, Back to Black, and White Label Coffee, all independent cafes and roasters in Amsterdam. Now, the time is ripe to check out three more such concerns—it’s 2017 and a golden age of micro-roasters is dawning on the Dutch capital.

Friedhats

The world has many a nice package, but on a shelf, Friedhats really stands out. It is a 250-gram brown PET plastic bottle that you could easily mistake for a jar of Vitamin C tablets, if it weren’t for that unmissable company mascot. Created by illustrator Ivo Janss, the psychedelic cartoon simultaneously channels Goofy and Henry Rollins, making what first appears to be a sign of the horns but, on second glance, could well be “I love you” in sign language.

Opened in November 2016, Friedhats is the city’s newest notable micro-roaster. Its co-owners, however, are old hands at coffee. Lex Wenneker is most widely known as the 2015 and 2016 Dutch Barista Champion, who last year placed sixth at the World Barista Championship, though he is most locally endeared for Headfirst Coffee Roasters, the Amsterdam cafe and roaster he co-founded in 2013 and co-ran until its 2015 closure. Dylan Sedgwick, a New Zealander with coffee industry jobs in Australia and London on his resume, got to know Wenneker while a barista and occasional roaster at Headfirst.

At Friedhats’ HQ, a garage in Amsterdam West, Wenneker can be found standing intensely over their Giesen W6, removing unpleasing bits from the batch with the kind of hand-eye coordination needed to win at whack-a-mole. Next to him, under the glitz of a mirror ball, Sedgwick adheres labels to bottles with the efficiency and precision Fordist dreams are made of.

The bottles are already a fixture at Amsterdam cafes, such as CT Coffee & Coconuts and Monks, and are being shipped for private retail as far away as Russia and China.

Yet, the duo readily acknowledge having to rebuild a clientele. “We lost all of our customers when Headfirst closed down, so we’re still starting up again,” Wenneker says.

Lex Wenneker and Dylan Sedgwick

Their sourcing has been intentionally limited in geography—the current focus is on Brazil, Colombia, and Kenya—but unrestricted when it comes to coffee varieties. “It’s just interesting to see what the different varieties do to the flavor,” explains Wenneker. “There was not that much variety in the variety section, but now you see more and more farmers that offer single varieties as well as importers that do that.” A recent exercise has been comparing as many Pacamaras from as many countries as possible.

A boom seems inevitable for Friedhats. Yet, it will force the pair to keep walking a tightrope between, as Sedgwick puts it, “communicating your own vision and being accessible at the same time.” In that sense, the dual reading of their mascot’s hand gesture—rawk on! vs. unspoken love—seems fitting.

Rum Baba

For all of Friedhats’ reference to headwear, Rum Baba actually has its own brand of beanies. Business and life partners Jeroen Keizer and Lusan Drost run the company, which includes a three-year-old trusty neighborhood cafe and, as of spring 2016, a second location devoted to roasting and baking. The couple has long been holding down the specialty coffee fort in Oost—that’s Dutch for “east” and what locals call this largely residential part of town, which is additionally home to Coffee Bru, a five-year-old cafe they co-own with two other partners.

But roasting is not entirely new for Rum Baba. Keizer explains that a whole year before their Probatone 12 had its own spot, he had to roast on “a big Loring” at CoffeeXperts, a private label roaster in Enkhuizen. Now, though, with a venue mere steps from their flagship cafe, regulars can come in for a quick pick-me-up—the few seats are barstools—or a quick pickup of provisions. Besides packaged coffees, this is where Rum Baba sells its famous baked goods in quantity, eponymous pastry included. “It’s a classic, it’s almost like sort of a cult cake,” says Keizer, of the rum baba, a rare syrup-soaked find in the Netherlands. And as for any recommended pairing, “I wouldn’t say a fruity coffee but more chocolatey,” he offers.

Asked how Rum Baba differs from other roasters, Keizer replies: “I think we all would say that we roast towards the origin, that we want to get the origin characteristics, but for me it’s that full flavor—we call it ‘body.’ I think that’s an important component. It’s not just bright acidity, but it must be good balance.”

Since two of his staff have also started roasting, Keizer has more time to work on new projects. So far, Rum Baba’s output has been exclusively single-origin coffees, but they are now ready to explore blends. Another future goal is to expand their resale channels. One remarkable client so far is the upscale Dutch department store De Bijenkorf, seven branches of which have begun selling the coffee.

That Rum Baba shares retail space with Nespresso, Illy, et al. might be unexpected, the sleek bags patterned with Scandinavian geometry in a Miami Vice palette appeal to a very now aesthetic. They are the vision of Dorst, whose background is graphic design. “I think we are handmade-[looking] enough,” notes Keizer, referring to the raw wood and burlap decor that surrounds him. So when it comes to packaging, “we like to express ourselves in a bright way.”

Stooker Roasting Company

If Rum Baba expresses itself in pastel-toned fancy, Stooker Roasting Company communicates with bi-chrome boldness. Its signature color, a Vermeer-esque ultramarine, lends gravitas to the brand—not that it ever lacked any. From the day in March 2015 that Stooker opened, co-founders Florian Hessel and Onno van Zanten set themselves apart. They are unique among Amsterdam specialty coffee professionals, having left posts at a highly respected cafe and roaster (both were at Lot Sixty One) not to start their own espresso bar, but rather to concentrate on roasting and training.

The Stooker Coffee Academy is one of the few Amsterdam locales to offer Specialty Coffee Association certification courses, and its associated studiousness has a halo effect on Stooker’s look and feel. Sans serif type identifies each coffee bag, whereon details, such as elevation and producer, are specified. The collection is numbered one through seven, each category encompassing a general roast profile.

Yoeri Joosten

Last year’s arrival of Yoeri Joosten, moreover, gave Stooker’s Giesen W15 a trinity of talent to take care of it. Joosten was the Dutch Cup Tasters Champion in 2013, 2014, and 2015—then ranking third in the World Cup Tasters Championship. Though not born with cupping spoon in hand, he grew up in Baarn, where Boot Koffie began in 1973 (decades before Willem Boot left for the US) and where at age 18, Joosten started as a dishwasher and eventually became a quality manager and a green buyer.

The Boot tenure seems to have made him precociously wise and pragmatic. Of Stooker’s sourcing, Joosten explains: “We work with importers that we trust, that we know pay good prices and are very involved in countries of origin. And I think because of our scale—our operation is very small—we have to look for partners in that way as opposed to bigger companies, they have more access to direct trade programs.” He continues: “It’s kind of hard to create value for the farmer really if you’re only going to say ‘I want these five bags,’ and the farmer has 500 bags, and maybe you even take all the best bags.” So a direct-line trade is something to try pursuing in the future, “but when we can afford to buy some more” and “really be of certain meaning to those people.”

Nowadays, 95% of Stooker’s sales are business-to-business. The label seems popular among spots that appeal to international visitors, such as design mecca Droog, Generator hostel, and music-themed hotel Jaz in the City. Like Stooker, they are all slightly off the beaten path but have their finger on the discerning consumer’s pulse.

Karina Hof is a Sprudge staff writer based in Amsterdam. Read more Karina Hof on Sprudge

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Move over, game birds, big-antlered stags, coats of arms, fleurs-de-lis, and all that other usual liquor-bottle iconography. There’s a new booze in town, and the label says it all: Patricia, a 22.7 percent ABV liqueur made with coffee from Lot Sixty One. At Amsterdam cocktail bars, where Patricia debuted earlier this year, the bottle is easy to spot—its logo is a pinball-machine maze of lines on a backdrop the color of persimmon.

Patricia’s alcohol base is jenever, the 16th-century Dutch invention traditionally distilled with juniper berries that begat what the English called “gin.” Its coffee component is FIVR, a Brazilian espresso from Amsterdam’s most venerable Australian-run roaster. And not coincidentally, the person behind Patricia is also Australian.

Peter Ong is best known in the Dutch capital for heading handmade sweets supplier Baked in Amsterdam. Nowadays, that company and Patricia are headquartered in the city’s culinary startup incubator Kitchen Republic. A few years ago, however, Ong—as a newcomer needing an oven—began baking his famous banana bread at Lot Sixty One.

More recently, its Kinkerstraat cafe served as his liqueur laboratory and its co-founder, Adam Craig, as his test subject. “Adam was sitting there tasting it and he was saying, ‘This is a really good idea. You should go for it,’” says Ong.

The choice was for a young (rather than old) jenever because it was more neutral, allowing the espresso’s chocolate and orange notes to come through. Unlike other popular coffee liqueurs, Patricia is vanilla-free, which is intentional: Ong says that keeps it from being “unfailingly restricted to the dessert side.”

At Lotti’s in the Hoxton hotel, head bartender Paolo Banfi recommends Patricia as an apéritif or a digestif. For a cocktail, he mixes it with Sipsmith gin, Cocchi vermouth, Merlet Lune D’Abricot liqueur, and dashes of orange bitters. “Boozy,” Banfi says.

“It’s lovely,” says Ray Luca, Lotti’s head barista, who also works at Lot Sixty One. “Compared with Kahlúa, [Patricia] is really more flexible.”

Flexible is an appropriate word to describe Ong as well. Back in his native Melbourne, he was an employment lawyer before realizing that wasn’t the best job for him. He pursued that career partly to appease his Asian parents, though he explains (more seriously) that his parents moved to Australia as refugees after the Vietnam War. Ong eventually emigrated to study pastry in Paris. His on-the-job training as a chef at Emperor Norton was formidable—clearly influencing his approach to Patricia today as well.

“I really, really want to focus on getting the pros in the cocktail world, giving them a new ingredient to get excited about,” he says. “The best butter in the world is butter from Jean-Yves Bordier, from Brittany in France. If someone gives me butter like that, I’m like, ‘Oh, goodie goodie!’ ”

Living in France also helped Ong to understand how many regions in and around the country have a signature alcohol: an Alpine offering proved particularly memorable.

“After a day of hiking, they pour you a shot of génépi,” he recalls. “This is really exciting: It’s so local, it has so much of the character of the place. And so when I think about it, as a description of a spirit, it’s not just ‘spirit’ in terms of strong alcohol, but it’s also the spirit of the place. So I wanted to do something similar here.”

As for Patricia’s neon-inspired bottle label, Ong explains: “I am a kid of the ’80s.” The name of the product came from a woman with whom he shared a couple days. When speaking of Patricia the person rather than the beverage, his usual precision gives way to poetics.

“When you’re traveling and you meet someone, it’s magic,” he says. “You sort of preserve a really perfect memory and a bit of a perfect mystique.”

After cracking himself up, he says: “I actually also do think that if I meet her again and I’m like, ‘By the way, I named a business after you,’ she might be like, ‘Ah, excuse me, what? Get away from me, you creep!’ ”

His John Hughes-ian self-awareness is bittersweet though encouraging—to be here and now, taking in what Patricia’s cork seal identifies as “Amsterdam coffee” and “Amsterdam spirit.”

Karina Hof is a Sprudge staff writer based in Amsterdam. Read more Karina Hof on Sprudge

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At 37, Kees Kraakman is approaching two decades in specialty coffee. The Netherlands knows him as a whiz kid, first taught to cup and roast by Jacob Boot, father of the brothers who today head Boot Coffee and Boot Koffie. Back in 2012, he launched pop-up Amsterdam espresso bar SOK and afterwards, for five years, ran roastery Stadsbranderij Noord. Still, Kraakman has largely stayed behind the scenes.

The opening of Café Keppler this past June in Amsterdam North might have been an opportunity for basking in glory. Yet when asked if it was always the plan to have his own place, Kraakman makes clear that he is not ready to revel.

“This should be my magnum opus, yeah—I’m definitely not 100% satisfied at this point,” he dryly replies, while conceding, “but this is the first time that I really took a gamble and a plunge to put up something like this.”

Kraakman and Lubben

Like its neighbors, the cafe won the right to establish itself on Van der Pekplein in a city contest for small businesses. Red awnings and butter-hued fenestration unite the storefronts, though Keppler’s corner spot and outdoor seating give it a sense of sprawl. Wraparound windows let lots of light in, warming the early 20th-century furnishings. The ceiling impresses, its wooden slats’ geometrical fashioning simultaneously evoking a classical music chamber and a Scandinavian sauna.

Restaurateur Mike Lubben, Keppler’s co-owner, adds to the harmony. The men have distinct responsibilities—“he’s the real HORECA [HotelRestaurantCafe] guy, and I’m the coffee guy,” notes Kraakman—though their values align. “We share the same vision in how we want to be open for everybody, so really, a neighborhood cafe with quality products.”

It was not for nothing that they named the venue after Arie Keppler, a social-democratic champion of public housing in Amsterdam. Kraakman says he liked the surname’s alliteration with “café.” That word was selected for its Dutch connotation of grand café, signaling “not only specialty coffee,” but a full food and drink menu, with alcohol and borrelhapjes (bar snacks).

In 1999, when Kraakman began working for the Boots, he was not cuckoo for coffee. He had simply grown up in the town where the family’s shop, The Golden Coffee Box, was located and was ready to move on from his job as a children’s train conductor at the Amersfoort zoo. After a decade at Boot, he left, moved to Amsterdam, and became a barista at Espressofabriek. Thanks in part to him, several of Kraakman’s colleagues would become Amsterdam’s most respected micro-roasters—Onno van Zanten of Stooker and Francesco Grassotti of White Label Coffee among them.

In an email to Sprudge, Grassotti calls Kraakman his “coffee hero,” crediting him as his roasting fundamentals teacher and the reason he is paired with his White Label partner, Elmer Oomkens.

“I don’t think there are roasters here in the Netherlands who have more knowledge of roasting coffee than he has,” writes Grassotti. Of a dinner that Kraakman co-organized to introduce Oomkens to the local coffee industry, Grassotti recalls: “Kees told me he really wanted us to meet each other because he thought we would like each other.” The gathering ended, he continues, “with Elmer next to me, to never leave my side again! In a way, on that evening, Kees created the fundamentals of White Label Coffee.”

Kraakman

The six-kilo Giesen that handles Keppler Koffie has its own premises nearby. Although Kraakman is there on Fridays, he calls his apprentice, Bart Feberwee, the main roaster. The standard collection comprises five single origins, their Brazil-Sumatra-Yirgacheffe North Blend and, somewhat controversially, their South Blend. This Peruvian and Brazilian mix—its profile advertises “a tribute to temperamental Italy”—is the result of Kraakman’s tedious experimentation with roasting past second crack, longer than he was ever taught to do or most peers would condone. But he has his reasons.

“I’m aware of the fact that a lot of people don’t like specialty coffee—[including] friends of mine—because of the acidity,” he states.

Referring to construction workers, notably those who helped erect Keppler, he reveals: “All the aannemers and the bouwvakkers, they are complaining continuously about sour coffee. ‘Aaah, you’re building this roastery with your sour coffee. Oh, boo, boo, boo!’”

So when it comes to this clientele, he explains, “I give them this South Blend, and they say, ‘Wow, finally. This is good coffee.’”

A similarly pragmatic attitude informs the decision to offer batch-brewed cups of single origins for €1.90. The Infusion Series BUNN, besides being efficient, “also fits in the mindset of a lot of people,” he says. “If you just tap a mug of coffee, that looks so much easier for a customer than if you see somebody weighing and dosing and measuring.”

For espresso, there is a two-group Synesso Cyncra. Grinders are a Nuova Simonelli Mythos One, an Anfim Caimano Barista, and a Mazzer Kony.

On a fall afternoon, Kraakman can be found sitting in a back room, flanked by his old one-kilo Giesen and Kees van der Westen Spirit Duette. It is here that he holds SCA-certified intro-to-coffee and roasting courses, part of working in his capacity as European lead trainer for Willem Boot.

“I’m really happy that we’re open and finally done, but at the same time, it was a terrible year because [it took] a lot of energy and frustration—sleepless nights,” Kraakman says. “I’m getting proud of it, but I think in two years’ time, I will be much more proud of it. There’s a lot of minor details we still need to fill in.” (Minutes before, Kraakman asked me by what color I might like to conduct an interview. He then proceeded to adjust the ceiling lights until they glowed a faint green approximating some of Keppler Koffie’s packaging.)

Incidentally, printed on those bags is the tangram duo from the company logo, designed by Hilje Oosterbaan and Casper Schipper. The front shows an aproned silhouette nobly holding up a tray. On the back appears a bowing tray-bearer in a tailcoat. They call to mind just what Kraakman is successfully negotiating between: specialty coffee’s peacocking and the humility required to fulfill a neighborhood’s real cafe needs.

Karina Hof is a Sprudge staff writer based in Amsterdam. Read more Karina Hof on Sprudge. 

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