FROM SACK TO SILO @museum.de

In front of the tasting table, there’s a large-scale photograph of the harbour taken in 1992. On the right of the shot, you can see the part of the Speicherstadt that was built during the first construction phase from 1885 to 1888. Our location, the coffee warehouse built in 1896, was part of the second construction phase and is not included in this view.

In the foreground is the former coffee storage facility, marked by a red pin. The facility was established in 1956, and in 1975, the world's first green coffee silo opened there to store loose coffee. Eight years later, the facility was expanded to add the three tall green silo towers. In the photograph, they can be seen to the right of the first white silo.

In the early days, coffee arrived in sacks, which were opened and emptied into the silo. In 1989, 14 years after the first coffee silo was built, the first container of loose coffee arrived in Hamburg. These days, most coffee is delivered loose in containers.

Since the warehouse district can’t cope with container transport, coffee storage and processing had to be moved to the Wilhelmsburg district of Hamburg, on the other bank of the River Elbe. All the coffee storage buildings were demolished in keeping with the planning for Hamburg’s HafenCity.

Today, the Coffee Plaza site between the Magellan Terraces and the Überseequartier is occupied by a white, elliptical tower designed by the prominent US architect Richard Meier.

In front of the entrance to the tower is a sculpture, 5 metres or 16 feet tall. It’s a bronze coffee bean created by the Austrian artist Lotte Ranft. The piece was donated by the Neumann Coffee Group, which has its headquarters there. It’s one of the world’s largest companies trading in green coffee.