Our story

A borrowed sample roaster, 2016

Wouter was managing a bar on Sleepstraat and hated the coffee he was serving. Anneke had a market stall selling nothing in particular. In the spring of 2016 a friend at a roastery in Sint-Niklaas lent us a 1 kg sample machine for a weekend and forgot to ask for it back for eleven months. That forgetfulness is the luckiest thing that has happened to this business.

We roasted on Thursday nights in a garage in Ledeberg, filled forty bags, and sold them on Saturdays under the awning of a hardware shop on Steendam, on a folding table, with a flask of filter coffee for anyone who stopped. The first Saturday took € 84. The twentieth took € 310 and we ran out by eleven. We were not good at roasting yet — we were simply the only people on that street who would tell you which farm the coffee came from.

The drum, 2018

We bought a second-hand 5 kg drum roaster from a bakery in Roeselare that was closing, for less than it was worth, because nobody else wanted to move it. It weighed 640 kg. Getting it into the workshop we were renting behind Dampoort took a hired crane, two days, and a hole in a wall that we paid to have rebuilt.

Then it sat there for five months while we learned that a drum roaster is nothing like a sample machine. We wasted, conservatively, 180 kg of perfectly good green coffee producing things that tasted of cardboard and burnt sugar. We sold none of it. Anneke still keeps one of the bags from that period on the shelf above the till, labelled with the date, as a corrective against nostalgia.

Nobody learns to roast from a book. We learned by spoiling a lot of coffee in front of the neighbours, and by writing down what we had done each time.

Sint-Amandstraat, 2020

The lease came up on a narrow brick front between a bike shop and a launderette — twenty seats, a back room exactly deep enough for the drum, and a landlord who had known the street for forty years. We signed in January 2020, which readers will recognise as poor timing.

We opened for takeaway in June, closed again in October, opened in the spring, and spent most of that first year selling bags through a hatch in the door. That is why the shelf matters here as much as the counter: for eighteen months bags were all we had, so we learned to do them properly — the roast date stamp, the harvest year, the card with the farm-gate price — and by the time people could sit down again, half our customers were coming for the shelf rather than the counter.

What we decided, and kept

A short list. Four coffees at a time, because we cannot honestly keep track of more. No music louder than the grinder. No laptops after noon on Saturdays, which costs us money and keeps the room worth sitting in. Tap water on every table without being asked. The same price standing or seated — we have never understood the other way round. And the roastery visible through glass, because a roastery behind a closed door invites you to imagine something more romantic than what is actually happening back there, which is two people arguing about a thermocouple.

We also decided, in 2022, not to open a second site. We were offered a good unit near Kouter and spent a month on the numbers. The honest answer was that everything we are proud of here depends on one of us standing behind that counter, and two counters cannot both hold one of us.

Now

Four full-time and two part-time. Roughly 4,400 kg of green coffee a year, which is small enough that our importers know us by our first names and large enough that the drum runs two mornings a week. Two restaurants and a bookshop buy the house blend by the kilo. About a hundred and forty people have a standing order. On a good Saturday the cabinet is empty by two.

We are not trying to grow much beyond this. The next three years look much like the last three: buy carefully, roast on Mondays and Thursdays, keep the list short, and stay open.

The people behind the counter