About
Our goal at Keen is to lift the coffee scene to an even higher level.
We’re excited to raise awareness about just how valuable coffee is. We love sharing the knowledge that we’ve gained in our 40 combined years of working with coffee.
We embrace knowledge, even when it reveals our flaws because it is only through knowledge that we can improve and grow.
We want to help people with a similar passion for coffee to further develop and improve their skills, and likewise, we are open to learning from those with passion and knowledge that they wish to share with us.
Our quest for the perfect cup
Keen’s philosophy
Day in and day out, we work with coffee: testing and approving roasting profiles, roasting and packaging your orders, and selecting new crops to share with you.
At Keen, we are constantly searching for the best coffees and the most unique flavor profiles. We work directly with farmers, sampling their coffees through cuppings, selecting new crops, and supporting new, innovative projects to improve the quality of our coffees.
As driven as we are by innovation, we are equally obsessed with optimizing the filter coffee and espresso recipes we use and teach.
Everyday we quest for the perfect cup because we believe true value lies in striving for perfection and not settling for it.
Selection
Our direct contact with farmers and importers means that we are constantly receiving new coffees to sample.
Receiving is easy, but deciding which coffees to feature is always difficult!
To make our selections, we do a blind cupping. One of us sample roasts the beans, while another sets up the cupping table. This method ensures that we are never influenced by price or origin when making our choice.
We smell, we taste, we discuss. We do a second cupping, smell, taste, discuss, and finally we choose which coffees to stock.
This process makes us thankful that coffee is our job.
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Brilliant selection
Sometimes we encounter a coffee that is completely different. Something so unusual and unexpected that we just have to share it.
For those of you who truly value new taste experiences and nuanced flavour profiles, we present our line of Brilliant Coffees.
Each coffee in our Brilliant line is exclusive to Keen and only offered for a limited time, so please don’t hesitate.
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Roasting style
Discover fresh sweetness, our signature style
Coffee beans begin as the seeds of fruit. A fruit with sweet and complex flavours, flavours that we strive to uncover in our coffees through our unique style of roasting.
Every coffee bean is different. Climate, growth height, and soil are just a few of the many factors that determine a coffee’s character.
With each new coffee we embark on a quest to develop perfectly balanced flavor profiles that highlight the beans’ natural qualities.
We roast on a Loring because it’s advanced technical design ensures that we maintain consistently high quality with every batch. Roasting with the Loring is also more efficient and improves the longevity of our beans, meaning that our coffees are at there best if brewed at least 10 days after they’re roasted.
The Loring lets us be more precise with our roasting, it’s smoke and odor free, and it’s more energy efficient. Better for your taste buds, our noses, and the environment.
SHOP KEEN
Top notch barista gear
Quality gear ensures that you can extract all of the beautiful flavours from your beans.
From the beginning of Keen, we’ve chosen to distribute products from Saint Anthony Industries. Saint Anthony’s line is innovative, high-quality, and beautifully designed. They offer innovative brew methods, a wide selection of tampers and produce some of the slickest denim aprons we’ve found.
We also work with Technivorm, makers of the Moccamaster. The Moccamaster is one of best and most reliable batch brewers on the market. And, even better, it’s as Dutch as we are!
Our hand mills are developed in Scotland by Made by Knock. They Aergrind is easy to adjust, compact (it fits in your Aeropress), and incredibly sturdy because they’re made from a solid block of aluminum. It’s an incredible mill that accompanies us wherever we go.
Direct trade
The first coffee we ever bought was through direct trade, a simple transaction between us and Natalia a contact we made in Brazil.
For a small team like ours, buying coffee directly is an ambitious goal, and this first purchase was only a small step to reaching it.
Our dream is to elevate and strengthen every link in the coffee chain, and this dream starts with our own coffee. We choose direct trade as a way to ensure that farmers are treated fairly and to make the coffee industry more equal.
But ethics are not the only reason we support direct trade.
We believe that fostering strong relationships between farmer, buyer, and seller, together we can take the quality of our coffees to the next level.
The team
United in our quest for the perfect cup
Bonne
Bonne is a true perfectionist.
A skilled barista with a strong design sense (evidenced by our hand made bar at the Amsterdam Coffee Festival). Bonne’s calm, yet exacting demeanor makes him a highly effective coach for competitive Baristas.
He turned his attentions to roasting now. Roast most of the Keen coffees.
Bonne has a 250 meter garden-jungle just on the outskirts of Utrecht where he grows fruit and vegetables of all kinds.
Rob
Rob is the creative genius
Not just an award winning barista, Rob is also head of branding and creative vision for Keen. Rob is always working to test new and better brew methods that he showcases in coffee competitions all over Europe. In 2015 he took 5th place at the World Brewers Cup.
Rob is seriously into fashion, he’s particularly obsessed with Selvedge denim and workwear.