Coffee under sail: Kaap and Tres Hombres

In short

• Kaap Koffie (Kaap de Groene Hoop, NDSM Amsterdam) sails its green coffee across the Atlantic once a year with its own initiative, Kaap Kargo, on the ship Ide Min.
• Tres Hombres is a 32-metre engineless brigantine run by Fairtransport. Every year she carries up to 40 tonnes of organic, fairly traded goods — coffee, cacao, rum — on wind alone.
• Both buy from Cooagronevada, a women-led organic cooperative in Colombia's Sierra Nevada, and roast in Amsterdam.
• Why it matters: shipping produces around 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Sail cargo is small, but it proves a different way of trading is possible.

Why ship coffee by sail at all?

Coffee only grows in the tropics, so almost every cup drunk in Europe has crossed an ocean. Usually that happens in a container on a heavy-fuel ship. Per bag the footprint of that journey is small, but the total is not: the UN's International Maritime Organization puts shipping at roughly three percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Sail cargo flips the logic. Instead of moving as much as possible as fast as possible, it moves less, slower, and with wind. It also tells a story you can taste: every bag on these ships has a name, a cooperative and a crossing behind it.

Kaap Koffie — "the cleanest coffee in the world"

Kaap de Groene Hoop is a sustainable hub at NDSM in Amsterdam-Noord. Its founder, entrepreneur Huib Koel, bought a ship and turned it into a sailing cargo vessel to fetch coffee for Kaap Koffie. The ship, Ide Min, leaves Amsterdam in late autumn, sails via the Caribbean to Colombia and the Dominican Republic and comes back in spring with coffee — and with cacao for the Amsterdam chocolate maker Wild Child Cacao and a little rum.

The crossing is driven by the old trade winds and currents. Kaap also works with other sail ships through Kaap Kargo: in June 2026 the schooner Avontuur unloaded coffee for Kaap Koffie at NDSM after eight months at sea.

What is in the bag:

• Coffee from Cooagronevada, a cooperative of women farmers in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. Across 19 villages, 78 families grow organic coffee under fair-trade and women-care standards.
• Roasted in Amsterdam by Spot On Coffee Roasters, medium to dark, with gentle acidity, a creamy body and a nutty finish.

Tres Hombres — a 1943 ship with no engine

In 2007 three friends found a wreck of a hull in Delft, built in 1943. With volunteers they rebuilt it in just over two years into a brigantine with 19 sails and no engine at all. That ship, Tres Hombres, gave its name to their company's movement: Fairtransport.

Every year she sails some 7,000 kilometres across the Atlantic and back, with a professional crew of seven and eight trainees — anyone between 18 and 65 can sign on, no experience needed. Each winter she is repaired by volunteers who learn the boatbuilding trade on her.

Fairtransport deliberately only carries goods that are not made in Europe, so it never competes with local producers. The coffee:

• Colombian beans from Cooagronevada, picked by hand, fermented and sun-dried, roasted medium-dark in Amsterdam with notes of blue and black berries.
• Dominican beans, hand-picked and sun-dried, with citrus, apricot and cocoa notes.

What sail can and cannot do

Honesty matters here. A brigantine carries 40 tonnes; a large container ship carries over 200,000. Sail cargo will not replace global shipping, and the last kilometres from port to cup still use trucks, vans or — in Germany — sometimes bicycles.

What sail cargo does do:

1. It shows that near-zero-emission ocean transport works, today.
2. It builds direct, long-term relationships with cooperatives like Cooagronevada.
3. It makes the hidden journey of coffee visible — and that changes how people value a cup.

How to drink it

Look for Kaap Koffie at Kaap de Groene Hoop in Amsterdam-Noord, and Tres Hombres coffee in their web shop and at the ship's summer port visits around Northern Europe. Both are in our Directory under Coffee shipped under sail.

The journey continues in your cup — and here, it started with the wind.