Cafés in Germany Berlin, Munich and Hamburg

Coffee sniffers and the Kaffeesteuer

Coffee has been a tax target for centuries. From 1781 to 1787 Frederick the Great of Prussia put a high luxury tax on it and allowed only state roasteries to roast. About 400 disabled veterans, nicknamed Kaffeeriecher (coffee sniffers), searched homes and travelers for smuggled beans and were hated for it.³

A version of that tax survives. Green beans enter Germany free of duty and coffee tax; roasting is what makes them taxable, at €2.19 per kilogram of roasted coffee and €4.78 per kilogram of instant.⁴ The Kaffeesteuer is a national excise outside EU harmonization, and in 2018 it brought the federal budget about €1 billion. Coffee sold as goods also carries the reduced 7% VAT rate.⁴

Melitta's filter and the Vollautomat

German filter coffee has a named inventor. On 20 June 1908 Melitta Bentz of Dresden filed a coffee filter with a domed, recessed base and slanted outflow holes as a utility model, after testing the idea with a perforated brass cup and blotting paper from her son's exercise book.⁵ Her company entered the commercial register on 15 December 1908 with 72 Reichspfennig of capital, patented the paper filter in its familiar shape in the 1930s and later moved to Minden.⁵

Filterkaffee (drip coffee) has lost ground at home. In 2025 sales of whole beans reached a record 193,800 tonnes, up 130% in ten years, while ground coffee fell by about 38% over the same decade.¹ One household in three now owns a Vollautomat, a bean-to-cup machine, and one cup in ten is made with instant coffee.¹

Hamburg, the coffee port

Hamburg opened its first coffeehouse in 1677, after merchants back from long voyages talked up the drink.⁶ In 1886 the firms in the trade formed an association, and in 1887 it pushed through a coffee futures exchange on the Sandtorkai. Bombs destroyed that exchange in the Second World War.⁶ Its successor, the Kaffeebörse on Pickhuben, was finished in 1956.⁷

Both stood in the Speicherstadt, the warehouse district built between 1883 and 1927 in Hamburg's free port, where imports could be stored duty-free. Coffee, tea and spices lay on five floors, each block with a canal on one side and a street on the other.⁷ Most of the coffee came from South and Central America, where Hamburg merchants also owned plantations, in Guatemala among other places, and the Speicherstadt became the world's largest coffee warehouse. Since 5 July 2015 it has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site.⁷

The trade stayed. More than half of Germany's coffee imports come into Hamburg, and the city's coffee business includes Darboven, Tchibo and the Neumann Kaffee Gruppe.⁶ Tchibo began there in 1949 as a mail-order firm founded by the merchant Max Herz and Carl Tchiling, sending roasted coffee by post; its first store opened at Caffamacherreihe 10 in 1955, where customers could taste a cup before buying.⁸

Kaffee-Mix: East Germany's coffee crisis

In the East, coffee was subsidized, and gift parcels from West Germany covered about 20% of demand. When poor harvests in the mid-1970s pushed prices up and dearer oil drained foreign-currency reserves, the government answered on 26 July 1977 with Kaffee-Mix, a blend containing only 51% coffee.⁹ The rest was substitutes, among them roasted peas, rye, barley and sugar-beet pulp.¹⁰

From August 1977 it replaced the cheaper brands Kosta and Mocca-Fix Silber. The swelling grounds clogged older machines, more than 14,000 letters of complaint arrived, and a Hamburg taster called it musty and earthy. The price was cut in September, and in January 1978 the Politburo stopped production.¹⁰

Berlin, Munich and Hamburg

Germany's small roasters cluster in the big cities, Berlin, Hamburg, Munich and Frankfurt among them, and Bonanza Coffee Roasters and The Barn, both in Berlin, are among the best known.² The Barn, open since 2010, added a roastery and café in the Brunnenviertel in September 2020, inside AEG's former headquarters, a building from 1883.¹¹ The country had 490 specialty coffee cafés on European Coffee Trip in late 2025, up from 294 in 2021.²

Munich's grand café is the Luitpold on Brienner Straße, built by the architect Otto Lasne and opened in 1888.¹² Bombing on the night of 18 December 1944 put out its lights; it reopened on 6 September 1962 and, redesigned, on 9 September 2010. A 1962 entry in its chronicle lists the cakes behind its Kaffee und Kuchen (afternoon coffee and cake): Swabian apple cake, Zwetschgendatschi (plum sheet cake), Sacher torte and Zug cherry torte.¹²

Munich's roasters are newer. Fausto, by the Auer Mühlbach, roasts more than ten espressos and supplies cafés across the city; Man versus Machine roasts light Central American, Kenyan and Ethiopian coffees for its bars on Müllerstraße, at Marienplatz and in the Maxvorstadt, and serves no syrups; the Kaffeerösterei Viktualienmarkt uses a drum roaster.¹³

Hamburg's pastry is the Franzbrötchen, laminated dough filled with sugar and cinnamon, eaten at breakfast or with afternoon coffee.¹⁴ One of its oldest traces is an 1825 handbill in which the baker Hieronymus Frisch offered Franzschbrod made to the recipe of the French baker in Altona, then under Danish rule; since the early 2000s it has spread to other German cities.¹⁴ Roasters such as Kaffee Stark and Café El Rojito work in the city.⁶