Kaffeemacher is a Basel coffee company founded by Benjamin and Felix Hohlmann. Its story began in 2013 with Café frühling in Kleinbasel, when specialty coffee was still a niche in the city. Today it roasts, runs three cafés and a bakery, teaches courses in Basel and in Germany’s Ruhr area, and makes a blog, a podcast and a YouTube channel. Its team has competed in coffee championships since 2009: at the 2026 German Coffee Championships Felix Hohlmann became German Barista Champion for the second time and Michael Rieker won Coffee in Good Spirits.

The roastery in the Gundeldingen district roasts everything on a 30 kg Giesen, with a Reicat catalyst to clean the air. Filter coffees get short roasts of between eight and ten minutes in 12.5 kg batches, lighter espresso roasts take 20 kg, and darker espresso roasts run 30 kg batches for 14 to 15 minutes. The coffee comes from about a dozen partners in ten countries, and since 2017 Kaffeemacher has been co-owner of Finca Santa Rita, a small farm in Dipilto in northern Nicaragua run with Claudia Lovo and Tim Willems of Brida Azul.

Café frühling serves breakfast, lunch and brunch. Since summer 2024 the company’s own bakery, the Brootmacher:innen, has worked next door, baking sourdough bread, quiche and Nordic-style cinnamon and cardamom buns, and the organic milk comes from the Marchmatt farm in Reigoldswil. Café sommer opened in summer 2026 in a restored historic transformer building on Winkelriedplatz in Gundeli, beside a playground and a boccia court, with pastries, a small lunch menu and ice cream; in winter it becomes a collection point for coffee beans with a to-go counter. The KM Café on the footbridge over Basel SBB station moved into a larger space with more than 40 seats and a wooden gallery in September 2025. It pulls changing coffees on three espresso machines and has a free tap for water treated for coffee.

Coffee on the shelf

Photograph: Kaffeemacher