In 2026, the coffee industry is plugging itself into the grid. Big roasters are going electric, hydrogen burners are announced for the end of the year, and specialty cafés are choosing silent, sealed machines tucked into workshops where not a breath of air gets in. We do the exact opposite: flame-roasted coffee, live, under the open sky, the smoke set loose in the wind. Not out of stubbornness. Out of conviction.
Why flame-roasted coffee when everyone is switching to the plug
An electric element gives constant heat. Predictable. The same on Tuesday as on Sunday, the same in January as in August. For a workshop that wants a thousand identical bags, it's perfect. For us, it's the death of everything that makes Meteo Koffie.
Fire is not constant. It has tongues, it has pulses, moments when it stretches and moments when it draws in. Golden, our roaster, doesn't execute a recipe — he negotiates one. The metal heats unevenly, the bean takes fire directly, and whoever holds the handle feels in his palm what no sensor shows: the exact instant to pull back.
The plug gives you control. The flame gives you character. We choose character.
Flame-roasted coffee reads the weather; the plug can't feel it
This is our monopoly, and no indoor roastery can take it from us. A flame in the open air doesn't burn alone — it burns with the weather. Cold air keeps it low and sharp. Humid air weighs it down. Wind slaps it, lays it flat, sets it up again. Every gust changes how much fire actually reaches the bean.
A climate-controlled workshop spends serious money to erase precisely that variable. It vents the smoke up a chimney, stabilises the temperature, isolates the bean from the world. The result is clean, repeatable — and mute. We let the world speak. That's why no lot resembles the one before it. The sky writes the recipe, the flame executes it, and you drink it.
If you want to hear how the weather turns into a cup, we've written about it at length in how the weather changes the taste of your coffee.
This weekend: flame-roasted coffee in a north wind
Saturday, Brussels climbs toward 27°C, with a moderate north-east wind, 20 km/h. The flame will stay calm, the smoke rising almost straight. Sunday, everything changes: 30°C and a north wind at 40 km/h that will fight the fire all day. The same coffee, two days, two characters. Whoever comes on Sunday literally drinks the conflict between flame and wind.
You can't schedule that. You can't reproduce it on Monday, back in the workshop. It happens now, at the market, or it doesn't happen at all. We told the story of that space between fire and wind in open-air roasting and Golden's three bells.
Brut: flame-roasted coffee out in plain sight
Electric roasting is convenient. It's also invisible — it happens behind a wall, in a metal box, far from you. Our flame is brutal precisely because you see it. You see the red metal, feel the wave of heat, cough a little when the wind turns the smoke your way. That's not a flaw. That's honesty as spectacle.
You can take home a lot roasted exactly like that, over fire and in the wind — on our coffee shelves or straight from the shop. But the best thing is to come and watch it burn.
Where to find flame-roasted coffee, Saturday and Sunday
Saturday and Sunday, we roast at the Marché de l'Abattoir, exit of the Manufakture car park, Anderlecht. Come when the flame is high. The rest is just coffee.
Brut. Sauvage. Imprévisible.
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