For weeks, the heatwave dictated everything. Now the weather has turned. This weekend, over the Marché de l'Abattoir, a south-west wind is blowing with gusts up to 50 km/h — and that means wind-roasted coffee, a coffee no indoor roaster will ever taste.
Because the wind doesn't come into a closed workshop. In a room with walls, the air stays tame, the temperature is just a number on a screen, and the weather outside is only news. With us, the wind is inside the drum. It stands against the flame. It is the co-author of the lot.
Why wind-roasted coffee tastes different
When the wind fights the fire, every minute of roasting is another. A gust pulls the heat sideways, the flame thins, the bean cools for a second — then the wind drops and the fire comes back, hungrier. Golden can't set a curve and walk away. He has to read the wind, feel when it returns, correct by hand.
The result isn't a "controlled" coffee. It's a coffee born of conflict. Where the heatwave rushed everything and the rain signed earthy notes, the wind chisels — it dries the surface of the bean faster than the core, and leaves a contrast: a sharp, cutting crust over a centre that still breathes sweet. A coffee with edges. Not round. Keen, alive, unpredictable.
That's the whole difference between roasting against the weather and roasting with it. An indoor roaster shuts the window so the humidity won't ruin the batch. We open the door and let the wind in. The risk is real — that's why no two lots are alike. But what comes out, the factory can't copy: the taste of one particular day, that will never come back.
Saturday's sky won't return
This weekend's 50 km/h gusts are an event. On Monday the wind settles, and this lot will live only in the cups of those who were there. We can't remake it. Not even Golden can, even if he wanted to — because he doesn't write the recipe, the sky does.
If you've already drunk a coffee roasted in the rain or one caught in the Brussels heatwave, you already know the weather isn't a detail — it's the taste itself. The wind lot is the other end of the same story: sharper, more nervous, wilder.
Come feel it while it's hot. The smoke dancing in the gusts, the metal singing, Golden wrestling the fire — all of it in plain sight, the way we always roast, in the open air. And whoever wants to carry a piece of this weekend home will find the lots in our catalogue.
We're at the Marché de l'Abattoir, at the exit of the Manufakture car park, Anderlecht. Saturday and Sunday. As long as the wind blows.
Brut. Sauvage. Imprévisible.
---
