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Great writing - combining a bit of history with today’s places to visit in Stellenbosch.

If you visit Van Rhyn’s, make sure to also take their cooperage tour. You will enjoy the sound and rythm of workers repairing brandy barrels. WOW

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My Hamburg born ancestor was involved in the re export of coffee from the cape between 1838 and 1840. Max Thalwitzer, the Hanseatic consul in Cape Town, was his uncle. My ancestor had just finished in Hamburg an apprenticeship with Carl Nottebohm who had begun to buy Guatemalan coffee plantations. My ancestor went to port natal on the back of sheep but he managed to establish coffee plantations in Riet valley. Neither wool nor coffee made him wealthy, but Nottebohm became seriously rich in the 1860s furing the north German coffee boom.

See Fenner Shaping the Coffee Commodity Chain: Hamburg Merchants and Consumption of Guatemalan Coffee in Germany, 1889-1929 https://www.scielo.org.mx/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1405-22532013000300002

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