THE BURG COFFEE ROASTING HOUSE RETAIL BUSINESS @museum.de

In 1923, Erich Burg established a retail business in Hamburg’s Eppendorf district and called it Kaffeerösterei Burg – the Burg Coffee-Roasting House. When the founder’s son, Jens Burg, took over the business in 1960, he didn’t confine himself to roasting and selling coffee, he also amassed a collection of thousands of coffee-related objects.

When Jens Burg in turn wanted to retire, he searched for a buyer with the right ideas to take over. He found Hamburg entrepreneur Holger Sturm, who’d trained as a tea trader in the warehouse district and was full of enthusiasm about the extensive coffee collection and the roaster.

After the purchase, Sturm moved the coffee collection to the warehouse district. Since the 11th of November 2015, he’s been running the privately operated Burg Coffee Museum in this building – along with the roastery, café and shop.

The coffee museum also includes this replica of the kind of retail business operated by the Burg family in the early 1950s – at a time when real coffee was a special treat, and certainly not the everyday beverage it is now.

Until 1953, a lot of customers only drank real coffee on Sundays or public holidays. Coffee tax in Germany was still 10 marks per kilogramme of roasted coffee, which meant that a kilogramme of coffee cost at least 16 marks.

For a worker who earned about 160 marks a month back then, coffee was almost unaffordable.

That meant coffee roasters couldn’t make a living from coffee sales alone. As well as chicory or grain coffee substitutes, the shop sold a lot of other things, as you can see from the display here. The range included cocoa and chocolate as well as spices, tea, tisanes and sugar cubes.

All the coffee tins on display are from coffee roasting houses here in Hamburg. They provide an insight into the many and varied coffee roasting businesses operating in Hamburg in the 1950s.