We Built This City…On Coffee: Hamburg and the making of Europe's coffee trade

On a long walk through Hamburg, somewhere between the fish markets and giant cranes, you might stumble a giant bronze coffee bean looks like its crash landed from space. But this giant coffee bean represents a staggering fact: one in every three cups of coffee drunk in Europe has passed through Hamburg. In the first half of this episode, we explore the many profound ways coffee shaped one of Europe’s most important cities. But then the story flips because, once coffee changed Hamburg, Hamburg began to change coffee. Series 3 of A History of Coffee is a collaboration between documentary maker James Harper of the Filter Stories coffee podcast and Jonathan Morris, Professor of History and author of ‘Coffee: A Global History’. Please spread the word about A History of Coffee!

You can listen to We Built This City…On Coffee: Hamburg and the making of Europe's coffee trade online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

We Built This City…On Coffee: Hamburg and the making of Europe's coffee trade is an episode from Filter Stories - Coffee Documentaries by James Harper.

This episode is 50:12 long.

This episode was published on Jan 5, 2026.

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