THE WAREHOUSE DISTRICT IN THE FREE PORT @museum.de

Perhaps you’re wondering why the coffee trade was so important for Hamburg’s warehouse district. It has to do with Hamburg’s free port that was first established in 1888. All and any foreign goods could be stored and processed in the free port – tax-free and duty-free.

The Speicherstadt was the part of the free port where especially valuable and sensitive goods were stored, including coffee. The free port was abolished in 2012.

When coffee was still being delivered as general cargo, in other words, in individual sacks, those sacks were unloaded from the ocean-going freighters on to smaller barges, known locally as “Schuten”. Hydraulically operated winches mounted on the outside of the warehouse were used to move the sacks inside. If you look out of the windows overlooking the water, you can still see the winches on the roof of the building opposite.

The large notebook on the big writing desk dates from the middle of the last century. It was used for bookkeeping. The trader had to record all the information about his ongoing business manually to ensure he was later able to reconstruct every transaction. The desk stands between two models of container ships, both on loan from the International Maritime Museum nearby.

The introduction of containers in the 1970s marked the beginning of the end of business as usual in the warehouse district. That’s because it was impossible to transport the containers to the warehouses by water. Instead, they were loaded on to lorries and driven to the doors overlooking the street. There, the sacks were unloaded and transferred to the warehouse with a winch on that side. You can’t use forklifts inside the warehouses, so low-pitched sheds have been built on the southern bank of the River Elbe to accommodate pallets and forklifts.

Most coffee is now shipped loose in containers. However, the best quality coffee still arrives in sacks.