Page 16 - Hafen Hamburg Magazin

■ PORT OF TASTE
AS SENSITIVE PRODUCE, COFFEE REQUIRES SPECIAL PROTECTION DURING TRANSPORT
A passion for shipping coffee
16 | Port of Hamburg Magazine | June 2020
Hapag-Lloyd has been bringing raw materials to Europe via the Port of Hamburg for more than a century.
A cup of coffee is of itself a real treat. Many enjoy one to start the day, after a meal or while chatting with friends. In Germany, around 200 million cups are en- joyed every day.“
Coffee was initially a luxury item; in this country it has long been a basic nutrient. The choice is vast, so is the tally of variations on how coffee is drunk - from Americano via Cappuccino to Latte Macchiato. Hamburg is traditionally a coffee trading centre. It is even seen as being partly responsible for making the Port of Hamburg so large and for construction of the famed Speicherstadt – or ‘Warehouse City’ – at the end of the 19th century. For over a century, this im- ported crop lay there along with cocoa, tea, tobacco and rubber. The city on the Elbe remains the world’s largest coffee trading centre. The Port of Hamburg annually handles around 700,000 tons of the green coffee.
1,500 CONTAINERS OF COFFEE PER WEEK
Nor is that all: For Hamburg-based shipping line Hap- ag-Lloyd, for more than a century coffee has been a typical cargo. In 1901, for example, the ‘Ham- burg-America Line Magazine’ staff journal reported that its own steamship ‘Granada’ had transported 113,085 bags of coffee worth over 100 million marks to Hamburg. Nowadays, one in every hundred con- tainers aboard Hapag-Lloyd ships contains green cof- fee or coffee powder. One 20-ft container can hold al- most 320 sixty-kilogram bags of green coffee. The shipping line transports around 1,500 containers of coffee per week to Hamburg.
With around 130 liner services, Hapag-Lloyd serves vir- tually all coffee-exporting countries. As one of the world’s largest coffee transport companies, the ship- owner cooperates with leading plantations, coffee trad- ers and roasting plants. The largest quantities of Arabica
© Hapag Lloyd