Antwerp handles more coffee than anywhere else in the world, the Brussels Times reported in 2023, with some 250,000 tonnes of beans in its warehouses for distribution across Europe. The same paper credits Rob Berghmans with changing the city’s coffee culture in 2003, when he opened Caffènation, bought the best beans he could find and roasted them in a large, old-fashioned roaster. More than twenty years on he runs four coffee bars in the city, supplies beans to cafés such as Broer Bretel, ToiToiToi and Coffee & Vinyl, and roasts at Pakt, a former builders’ yard in Berchem.

The pioneer

European Coffee Trip, the speciality coffee guide, calls Caffènation a pioneer, and the evidence is in the people it trained. Bert van Wassenhove, who grew up in Brasschaat and went to hotel school in Antwerp, spent about twelve years roasting and making coffee for Berghmans, won the Belgian Cup Tasters Championship in 2010, and then opened his own Caffènation at Warmondstraat 120 in Amsterdam, which marked its first year in 2016. Owners of the early speciality coffee bars in Amsterdam, the guide The Coffee Vine wrote in 2023, regarded Berghmans as an idol. When the roastery moved to Pakt, the man at the roaster was Jeff Verellen, whom European Coffee Trip introduced as a two-time AeroPress World Champion.

The bar at Mechelsesteenweg 16 sits on the edge of the Zuid and the city centre, near the Nationale Bank tram stop. It opens every day, from 8:00 (10:00 on Sundays) until 17:00, or 18:00 on Fridays. Bags of beans are listed at €7.25 to €12.50 for 250 grams. The house blend, The Roast ED, mixes beans from Burundi, Brazil and Guatemala; a double espresso of the Brazil Ian blend is €3.20. Further down the same road, at Mechelsesteenweg 127, Caffènation Blue opened in 2023 in the M127 building, over two floors, with its own small bakery, a covered terrace and a self-service tap for batch-brewed filter coffee, a system first developed in Australia. A flat white there was €4.10 when it opened.

A builders’ yard in Berchem

Pakt began as a planning problem. In 2006 the brothers Yusuf Yaman and Ismaïl Yaman bought an abandoned construction yard of derelict warehouses at the Lamorinièrestraat, between the new Groen Kwartier and the old Jewish quarter, and planned lofts to sell or rent. The city’s building rules would not allow it. In 2014 they changed course and turned the site into a hub for small businesses, with the architect Roel Vermeesch converting the warehouses into workspaces over two years. The site covers about 7,000 square metres, and it was officially launched in September 2017. “Can you believe this was almost knocked down?” Stefan Bostoen, the entrepreneur who guided the brothers, asked Monocle, which reported on the site in its December 2017 issue.

The renovation kept what it could. The original concrete window frames stayed, with double glazing in bubble glass fitted behind them to meet the regulations, and an old bridge still links the rooftops above the cobbled, car-free courtyard. “We kept the concrete structure of the windows,” Yusuf Yaman said. In 2017 Monocle found a CrossFit gym as the oldest tenant, the app developer Bagaar, the model agency Ulla Models, the pizza restaurant Standard and Caffènation. By the reckoning of TU Delft’s Circular Design Atlas, some 25 businesses settled on the site in less than ten years: chefs, brewers, baristas, coffee roasters and circular start-ups.

The roof

The roofs hold the site’s other attraction, an urban farm of about 1,800 square metres of vegetable and herb beds, with 200 square metres of greenhouses that Monocle described in 2017 as the largest of their kind in Belgium. The agro-biotechnologist Bram Stessel and the community specialist Adje Van Oekelen were hired in 2016 to design it, and it has run since 2017 as a circular community garden. The greenhouse tomatoes are fed with compost from fish-tank waste in an aquaponics system, and rainwater is collected. The Jane, then in the chapel of the old military hospital in the Groen Kwartier, grew herbs and edible flowers on one section of it. The cooperative behind the roof, Dak van Pakt, was registered in 2013, with Stessel, Van Oekelen and Yusuf Yaman among its directors.

The roastery belongs here rather than on a shopping street. Roasting is light industry, a former builders’ yard that kept its concrete window frames is an honest place to do it, and a bar under the same roof shows the work without dressing it up. When European Coffee Trip visited, the espresso bar at Lamorinièrestraat 161 was also the company’s headquarters and offices, with a white three-group La Marzocco Strada, two Anfim grinders and a self-service batch brewer. Lieke Van Wassenhove, who ran the café when Berghmans was away, set out the policy plainly: “We want to be a place for everyone, young or old; we do not want to offend anyone.”

What runs where

The roastery and bar at Pakt are listed as open from 8:00 to 17:00 on weekdays and from 10:00 to 17:00 at weekends. Elle Belgium, choosing coffee bars to work from in 2024, recommended all four Caffènation addresses for a laptop day, and singled out Caffènation Blue for its bakery. The Caffènation site covers the roaster and its coffee bars. Visit Antwerpen lists the company among the handful of city roasters that roast their own beans, alongside Cuperus, the coffee and tea house founded in Friesland in 1823, Normo and Kolonel Koffie.

An earlier version of this page described a greenhouse, an atrium, a bakery called Bakker Aldo, a laundry café, a taqueria and a design prize won in 2020, and gave Berghmans a quote about great coffee being just the beginning. None of it could be confirmed. What can be confirmed is plainer and better: a roaster who started in 2003, a yard that was nearly demolished, and a roof that grew herbs for a restaurant that has since moved to the Eilandje.