Rotterdam coffee: roasters in a hotel, a warehouse and old garages

Eight of the ten places in this Rotterdam guide roast their own coffee, three of them in a coffee hotel in Crooswijk, a 1929 warehouse and two converted garages in Delfshaven. A fourth, Heilige Boontjes, runs its café in a former police station. Hopper dates from 2010, and Giraffe has roasted since 2013. Two more Rotterdam roasters have no café in the city: Manhattan Coffee Roasters, founded in 2017 by the competition barista Esther Maasdam, and Mellow Coffee Roasters, which roasts to order on ROEST machines and was set up to show what Asian origins can do. Manhattan’s coffee is on the bar at New Jozi and Kopi Soesoe, and Mellow’s at New Jozi.

Man Met Bril Koffie, the coffee hotel in Crooswijk

Man Met Bril Koffie has been a Rotterdam roastery and café for more than ten years, and it now runs from the Man Met Bril Koffie Hotel in Crooswijk, across from the Rotte, opened as “the world’s first Coffee Hotel”. The building has 15 rooms, the roastery, a coffee bar, meeting rooms, a training area, a terrace and a kitchen. In the café, guests can watch the roasters at work, order a filter coffee from the brew bar or an espresso from Frank, a five-group machine designed by Kees van der Westen that combines two lever groups, two touchpad groups and an adjustable pre-infusion cylinder. Through the Residency Programme, eight coffee and hospitality professionals from around the world live and work at the hotel at any one time, behind the bar and in the kitchen. Pizza Palace runs a sourdough pizza counter inside, and Bar Dertien serves dinner. The café takes no reservations and no cash. Its Hotel Blend is the blend poured in the café, and House Blend is the roaster’s first blend with robusta, from India’s Elkhill Estate.

Schot Coffee Roasters, the Diepeveen building near Delfshaven

Schot Coffee Roasters roasts and pours in the former warehouse of the Diepeveen building, a 1929 landmark in the cubist expressionist style of W. Kromhout Czn., with a 30-metre tower that once served as an advertising column. Atelier Thomas Dirrix redeveloped it in 2022, and it now holds potters, designers, a bookshop, the Huidenclub gallery and a wood workshop. Schot buys from farmers and trusted suppliers on long-term relationships, pays premium prices rather than buying certified coffee, and roasts light every week in small batches on a Giesen W15, with separate profiles for filter and espresso where a coffee has both. Washed, honey and natural coffees are the focus, with few anaerobic lots and no co-fermented or infused ones. The bar keeps food to a few lunch items, cakes and pastries and serves two espressos, batch brew and hand brews; most coffees in stock can be ordered there, up to the competition range. There is a large terrace, and Schot also sells at the Rotterdamse Oogst market on the Noordplein.

Giraffe Coffee Roasters, Stadsdriehoek

Giraffe Coffee Roasters has roasted in Rotterdam since 2013, with a mission to build a fair bridge between the coffee producer and the coffee drinker. Its steady growth now lets it buy in larger volumes, which, by its own account, gives the farmers it works with a guaranteed, livable income over the long term. The range pairs blends for an everyday cup with single origins chosen for region, variety or process, most of them roasted separately for espresso and for filter; head roaster Skip bought one recent lot at a live auction in Nariño, Colombia, after judging the regional competition there. The Giraffe Coffee Bar & Academy in the city centre pours the house coffees, from espresso and cappuccino to fruity filter coffees, with a menu of JING teas, sells beans and brewing gear, and welcomes dogs on a lead. The Academy’s training room is in the basement, where Giraffe runs SCA Barista Skills, Brewing and Sensory courses and workshops in latte art, home espresso and filter coffee.

Ripsnorter Coffee Roasters, Stadsdriehoek

Ripsnorter Coffee Roasters is named after Melbourne slang for something truly epic, picked up while the team lived and worked there. Back in the Netherlands they opened a café in Rotterdam, then started roasting out of curiosity about what roasting does to a coffee. The espresso bar serves its coffees in two ways: the Origins collection is the everyday menu, and the Bloody Ripper menu is for competition-style coffees and unusual techniques, with lots that rotate from classic washed coffees to experimental fermentations. The shop sells single origins from Colombia, Ethiopia and Indonesia in separate espresso and filter roasts, the Delirious espresso blend and a collection of small omni lots, among them geishas from Panama and Colombia. Owner Zjevaun Janga won the Dutch Barista Championship in 2024 and again in 2025, the second time with a natural geisha from Hacienda La Esmeralda and an Aji Bourbon from Nestor Lasso stacked in one puck.

Hopper Coffee, Centrum and Noord

Hopper Coffee started in 2010 as a plan for a small coffee bar with good coffee and lunch. Working out which coffee and which bread to serve, the founders kept arriving at the same answer, to make both themselves, so a French-style floor oven came in for sourdough and a Giesen roaster for the coffee. Hopper now has a café and bakery in the centre and a second café in Noord, where the roasting happens, plus a third in Zeist. Over the years the team has built roast profiles for filter, for a full espresso and for coffees bought to go with milk foam, soya or oat milk, and the shop sells an organic Ethiopian espresso and filter coffees. The sourdough is flour, water, salt and Hopper’s own starter, risen overnight and baked on the oven floor, about 48 hours from feeding the starter to the finished loaf, and the croissants, biscuits and cakes come from the same bakery.

Heilige Boontjes, Eendrachtsplein

Heilige Boontjes was started in 2015 by police chief inspector Marco den Dunnen and reintegration specialist Rodney van den Hengel to give young Rotterdammers who have got stuck a new start. Everyone who works there is one of those young people, and the business has helped more than 400 of them. Its grand café is in Bureau Eendracht, a police station from 1932 that the police left in 2015; the founders opened the café there in 2016, and where suspects were once questioned it now serves specialty coffee, breakfast, lunch, cakes, special beers and cocktails, with a terrace on the square. The team roasts and pours its own coffee, bought from farmers at a fair price, and the list includes two house filter coffees, Bakkie Pleur and Bakkie Roffa, the second topped with a double espresso. Heilige Boontjes coffee is also sold online and in Jumbo supermarkets.

Evermore, Delfshaven

Evermore is a family business that began in 2008 with loose tea, sold by Eline Sandberg and her son Lowik Pieters under a name taken from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven. A year later Ian Pieters started roasting coffee with his son Aito, mostly in a shed in the back garden, and the roasting later moved to Delfshaven, where Evermore and KookstudioMix converted two old garages into a roastery, a cooking studio, a tea-packing room, a coffee and tea bar and a shop. Ian roasts every week. Evermore roasts only single origins, from one cooperative or even one farm, and does not blend, so each coffee can be traced to its origin and harvest. Almost every coffee carries an organic, Fairtrade or Rainforest Alliance certification, and in 2015 Ian visited Joy Tushabe of the Ishema Women’s wetmill in Rwanda. The shop also sells loose teas and single-origin chocolate, and the back room, shared with KookstudioMix, is used for tastings and dinners and can be hired for meetings, workshops and small concerts.

Spicekix Coffee Lab, Kralingen

Spicekix Coffee Lab supplied large companies until the pandemic kept coffee drinkers at home, when it started selling freshly roasted coffee directly to drinkers and turned from a roaster into a coffee lab. It sources through direct collaborations with farmers and their washing stations and roasts on three lines: ultra-light single origins from Ethiopia, Colombia and Brazil, roasted to bring out the bean without the burnt taste of roasting; medium roasts for fully automatic machines; and spiced coffees. Fazenda California, a double-fermented washed Brazil, is the lab’s go-to coffee. The lab in Kralingen works to house rules, the Spicekix Protocol: drinks are served as designed, with alternative milks available, phone speakers stay off, laptops stay closed outside the laptop area, and every adult guest orders a drink.

New Jozi Coffeehouse, near the Markthal

New Jozi Coffeehouse opened in December 2025, ten minutes on foot from the Markthal, as one place to try roasters from Rotterdam and Amsterdam. Its shelf holds around 33 coffees from Manhattan, which roasts the house espresso, Schot, Mellow, Shokunin and Grounded, with Ripsnorter also on its list of roasters, and any bag on the shelf can be ordered at the bar as espresso, V60 or batch brew. Schot roasts New Jozi Suni, a Brazilian house blend, and there is a second house blend, Viola. The co-founders, Lionel and Dave, came from corporate careers: Lionel runs the coffee and Dave the kitchen, which serves brunch all day. After the bar closes it hosts cuppings and takeovers, and the Rotterdam Coffee Tasters Club meets every other Sunday to cup four coffees blind.

Kopi Soesoe, Katendrecht

Kopi Soesoe is an espresso bar and acoustic music stage on the Deliplein in Katendrecht, named after the Indonesian for coffee with milk; the house drink of that name is Indonesian coffee with condensed milk and cardamom. The coffee comes from Manhattan Coffee Roasters and Schot: the espresso is Inacio Soares, a Brazil roasted by Manhattan, pulled on a La Marzocco Linea, and filter coffee runs through a Moccamaster, with V60 and AeroPress when there is time. Every bean used at the bar is for sale. The kitchen serves breakfast every day, sandwiches, toasties and cakes baked in house, the beer list runs to Budvar, Saison Dupont and Orval, and the small stage hosts concerts where the audience listens in silence. It is a laptop-free bar and takes no reservations.

What you need to know about Rotterdam specialty coffee

Which Rotterdam coffee shops roast their own coffee? Man Met Bril Koffie roasts at its hotel in Crooswijk, Schot in the Diepeveen building, Giraffe at its own roastery in the city, Ripsnorter for its espresso bar, Hopper at Hopper Noord, Heilige Boontjes for its grand café in a former police station, Evermore in Delfshaven and Spicekix for its lab in Kralingen.

Where can you drink Manhattan Coffee Roasters’ coffee? Manhattan’s roastery is a production site without a café. New Jozi pours it as the house espresso, and Kopi Soesoe uses Manhattan’s Inacio Soares for its espresso.

Where can you try several roasters side by side? New Jozi keeps bags from Manhattan, Schot, Mellow, Shokunin and Grounded on its shelf and brews any of them at the bar.

Can you work on a laptop? Kopi Soesoe is laptop-free, and Spicekix keeps laptops to a designated area.

Can you book a table? Man Met Bril Koffie’s café and Kopi Soesoe take no reservations.

Where can you learn about coffee? Giraffe runs SCA courses and workshops in the basement of its coffee bar, New Jozi hosts the Rotterdam Coffee Tasters Club, and Schot has held cuppings and brewing workshops at its bar.

Can you stay the night? The Man Met Bril Koffie Hotel has 15 rooms in the same building as its roastery and café.