Our Story

1836

Beginnings in Colonial Goods

According to family records, the house was founded in 1836 by C.P.L Hanssen  as a trader in colonial goods — the broad category of imported staples, from sugar to spices, that sustained Hamburg's merchant economy. A decade later, in 1846, the firm narrowed its focus to a single commodity that was rapidly becoming Hamburg's specialty: coffee.  

1847 

Rödingsmarkt 36 

The first written trace of our house appears in the Hamburg address book of 1847, where the firm of Hanssen & Studt is recorded among the city's merchants — Kaufleute — operating from Rödingsmarkt 36, in the heart of Hamburg's old trading quarter. The partners were C. P. L. Hanssen and H. Studt, and the firrm's business, as for so many Hamburg houses of the era, was coffee. It was a city built for this kind of trade. Standing at the mouth of the Elbe river, Hamburg had spent two centuries becoming Europe's gateway to the Atlantic world — and coffee, arriving from the Caribbean, Central America, and beyond, was becoming one of its great commodities. 

ST. ANNENUFER 

A Warehouse of One's Own 

As Hamburg's free port expanded and the canals of the Speicherstadt rose from the water, Hanssen & Studt made the investment that marked a serious trading house from a modest one: a dedicated coffee warehouse on St. Annenufer, built to store, sort, roast, and prepare green coffee for a continent's breakfast tables. Few private coffee firms of the period were signifcant enough to have their warehouses identifed by name rather than simply by block and number. Hanssen & Studt was one of them — a telling measure of the house's standing among Hamburg's merchant elite. 

By the century's end, Hamburg's Coffee Exchange — opened in the Speicherstadt in 1887 — had become the third most important raw coffee trading place in the world, afer New York and Le Havre. Hanssen & Studt traded at the center of that world. 

A HANSEATIC CIRCLE 

The Hanssen-Canel-Laeisz-Lagemann  Connection

Hamburg’s merchant houses rarely stood alone; they were bound together by marriage, partnership, and shared ambition. The Hanssen name became closely linked with Canel and Laeisz — Canel, a Hamburg shipowning family whose patriarch, Friedrich Heinrich Ramon Canel, carried in his name echoes of the wider Atlantic world in which Hamburg traded; and Laeisz, the shipping magnate who founded Hapag (today Hapag‑Lloyd). Their closeness was etched in stone in 1885, when the Hanssen, Laeisz, and Canel families — united by intermarriage and business — established a shared burial site at Hamburg’s Ohlsdorf Cemetery, a monument that endures to this day. Where the Canels owned ships that carried goods across oceans, the Hanssens were merchants, and the Laeisz family built Hapag to turn those cargoes into commerce. Coffee, more often than not, was the thread that bound them together. In time, the Lagemann family joined through marriage, bringing with them extensive connections and trade networks in South America as well as New York, particularly in the sugar trade.  

APHONS B. HANSSEN 

The Driving Force of Expansion 

As a young man, Alphons B. Hanssen spent three years, from 1896 to 1898, travelling through the coffee-growing countries of the world — learning the trade not from a Hamburg office but from the farms, ports, and growing regions that supplied it. It was an apprenticeship of a kind few merchants of his generation undertook so thoroughly. That firsthand knowledge of origin shaped the house he went on to lead. In the early years of the twentieth century, Alphons B. Hanssen took the firm to its greatest hights, expanding its trade and presence in Hamburg significantly, adding a subsidiary coffee trader Otto Embden & Co, and a brewery  - the Bill Brauerei, which were led by Alphons' son-in-law Alfred Carl Lagemann and grand-son Ralph D. Lagemann.

TODAY 

A Name, Carried Forward         

The Hanssen & Studt name did not disappear with the firm. It persists in Hamburg to this day — and it is in that continuity that this house finds its new chapter. We have not reopened a warehouse on St. Annenufer. We have done something we think more fitting: we have gone back to where the story is still told — to the museums and coffee houses of the Hamburg Speicherstadt, to the canal-side streets our predecessors once walked — and we have begun, once again, to sell coffee under a name that has waited to be used again - standing for tradition, quality, and innovation. Our sourcing today reaches toward Mexico — Chiapas, Oaxaca, Veracruz — origins that echo, if not replicate, the transatlantic routes that built Hamburg's coffee trade in the first place. We buy honestly, we roast carefully, and we tell the story plainly: including the uncomfortable parts. The nineteenth-century commodity trade that built fortunes was entangled, as so much of it was, with colonial systems we do not romanticize. We carry the name forward because the history is worth remembering — not because every part of it deserves celebration.