Milch

Nico Ueckermann trained as a bank clerk, worked in retail, and moved to Hamburg in 2014 for love with zero coffee experience, a blank slate he says meant almost nothing could go wrong. He opened Milch in January 2015 inside a former dairy shop in the Portuguese Quarter, inheriting most of its 1950s milk shop character because the family who had run it before him hadn't changed much either.

A small roaster sits on display behind a self built blue tiled counter, Nico's own comparison is that roasting coffee is just like cooking. The flagship pour, Hamburger Rummel, is 100 percent Robusta, a deliberate stand against Hamburg's dominant light roast trend, alongside a Dirty Italian hot chocolate spiked with espresso and a ginger beer and espresso drink called Dark and Spicy. Dogs wait tied up outside while their owners are in, enough of a fixture that locals nicknamed them the Portuguese Quarter's own Milchdogs.