Collection: Caffènation 🇧🇪

In 2003, Rob Berghmans opened a small espresso bar in Antwerp because he had had enough of watching his city serve coffee "without love". He started alone, on a shoestring, and sold a tonne of coffee in the first year. More than twenty years on, Caffènation presents itself as the very first specialty coffee bar in Belgium. The house has four addresses in Antwerp, a fifth in Amsterdam, and a roastery whose coffees are served well beyond Belgium. Berghmans, for his part, readily describes himself as "third wave avant la lettre".

The first thing you notice is the bags. Bright red, turquoise, orange, pink or yellow, each one carries a character's name, Filter FIL, Kenya KAY, Brazil IAN, Miss XX, Roast ED, in a typeface inspired by Cuban political graffiti, with stars dotting the i's. The house slogan, "One Drug, One Nation", sets the tone. Yet the range is built methodically, with one character per use and, beneath its name, the lot of the moment, which changes with the harvests.

From Hopland to the Giesen at PAKT

In the early years, the menu lined up lattes and cappuccinos, in the spirit of the American coffee shops Berghmans admires. The turning point came around 2006, when he began competing in barista championships and discovered a scene obsessed with precision. In 2010, tired of the beans his roaster was delivering, he decided to roast them himself. The workshop first set up in the Port of Antwerp, around a Giesen W30A, then moved to the PAKT site on Lamorinièrestraat, in former brick industrial buildings that now house the roastery, the offices and a bar. The original café on Hopland, a major shopping street in the centre, moved in turn to Mechelsesteenweg after almost ten years.

The roastery owes a great deal to Jeff Verellen, the house barista and roaster, the first two-time World AeroPress Champion, crowned in 2011 and again in 2013 in Melbourne. The style is light, on the Scandinavian side of the spectrum, with a fondness for African coffees. Yirgacheffe has been on the menu since day one, and Kenyan lots from Kirinyaga return year after year. As early as 2013, Berghmans wrote that dark roasting belonged to the past and that filter coffee was "a sleeping giant". At the time, the house was already selling five times more filter than espresso at retail. In 2015, Bert van Wassenhove, a barista and roaster with the house for a dozen years, left to open Caffènation Amsterdam on Warmondstraat. In 2023, the year it turned twenty, the brand opened Caffènation Blue, once again on Mechelsesteenweg.

Published FOB prices and Direct Trade

Caffènation practises an uncommon degree of transparency. Every product page names the importer, Nordic Approach, Sucafina Specialty or Top of the Crop, and some show the FOB price paid for the green coffee, to the cent. Each coffee also comes with a "Rob says", the founder's commentary, in which he does not hesitate to recall the common flaws of Brazilian coffees or to tell the story of a Kenyan lot returning after ten years away. Since 2025, Mathias, the green coffee buyer, has run a Direct Trade programme with the exporter Azahar. It began with a Colombian washed decaf, followed by a natural lot produced on demand by Rafael Aya, then a honey from the Atitlán community, in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. Berghmans himself points out that these bags account for less than 1% of the house's volume.

The Roast ED blend, one third Colombia, one third Ethiopia, one third natural Brazil, celebrated its twelve and a half years in 2026 with a Copper edition. It combines washed and natural coffees to stay round and sweet even when the extraction is not perfect, an approach that sums up Caffènation rather well, serious about the bean and relaxed about the rest.