Coffee and Tea Museum (Amsterdam)

[Post published by Liviu on Liviu's [in Netherlands] Blog]

2nd of July: cloudy, dark,  showers and rain, i.e. the usual Amsterdam weather.


Coffee and Tea Museum (Amsterdam)

• Coffee and Tea Museum official site (Dutch version only)
• Description on Amsterdam.info
• There's no need for a description on Museumkaart site

Admission: free for everyone. (The challenge is to get there exactly when it's open :p)
Photos are allowed, of course.

The museum overall is very small - technically it's one quite small room (25 m^2), crowded with exhibits.


Schedule: Only on Saturdays, during the 14:00 - 16:00 time interval.
Indeed, on the site says 16:30, but that's old news! Now it's 16:00.


My opinion on the Coffee and Tea Museum

Quite a cool & entertaining & small museum.
There are 2 ladies selling in the shop downstairs and one of them has acted as museum guide.

The only thing that got me really impressed was a machine for roasting the coffee - technically, it was like a double oven (i.e. a small oven inside a bigger oven, in order to keep the heat trapped in the small oven) with 2 handles:

• one handle allowed one to rotate the small oven inside the big oven, therefore to ensure to coffee got roasted uniformly
• another handle allowed one to pull a few beans of coffee directly from the small oven in order to check their status, therefore one had access directly to the beans from the small oven without stopping the process or losing heat.

That's a cool piece of industrial machinery for coffee processing (i.e. roasting) in its early stages!

Other than that there were some other quite cool exhibits which you shall have to explore for yourself.

It's funny the museum is located inside the over crowded historic center, but none of the tourists has any idea what's inside that specific building - just a few even enter the Geels & Co. shop to look for some tea and/or coffee. I call this a side effect of over advertising the coffee shops (i.e. light drugs smoking shops) and the Red Light District - bad over advertising!

I wish there have been some facts about the Geels family too. After having visited the famous houses of some famous families [van Loon, Geelvinck Hinlopen, Willet-Holthuysen] I got the taste for such things. Ok, maybe the Geels were just merchants, but still some story could be told about them, I guess...



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Conclusions

Coffee and Tea Museum (Amsterdam) is quite a cool museum which surely deserves a visit if you find yourself in the area exactly at the time when it's open (i.e. 14:00-16:00 only on Saturdays).