They've pulled the shutters down. One by one. The café on the corner — closed until 1 September. The fine roastery across the water — on holiday, back in autumn. The Brussels of August is a city that leaves: suitcases at the station, motorways heading south, pavements empty at the hour you'd normally queue. And in the middle of that absence, smoke rises straight up over the Marché de l'Abattoir. A coffee roastery open in August, when there's almost no one left.
We don't pull the shutters down. Golden doesn't know what a holiday is.
A coffee roastery open in August — why we don't close
It's simple, and not romantic at all: we've got nothing to close. No warehouse to pull sacks from that were roasted three months ago. Our coffee is born on Saturday and Sunday, on the spot, in the open air. If we went on holiday, there'd be no coffee. So we stay. While the city empties, we have exactly what you can't find anywhere else in August: coffee roasted today, not in spring.
And that's the lovely paradox of the month. The more roasteries close, the more the weekend lot matters. It's the only living coffee in a city that has put everything on pause.
What the air writes into the lot of a coffee roastery open in August
This weekend the sky turns the page. After weeks of heatwave, cooler maritime air pushes in from the west — pressure shifts, humidity climbs, August shows its true face: damp and unpredictable. The beans feel it first. The heavier air softens the husk, the roast rounds out, the notes settle deeper than at the peak of the heat.
No one can redo this lot. Not because we're hiding a recipe, but because the recipe is written by Saturday's sky — and Saturday's sky doesn't come back. That's the whole point of our open-air roasting: letting the weather sign every bean. If you want the full story, we've laid it out in the Meteo Koffie experience.
Small lots from a coffee roastery open in August, in the empty city
August is quiet, but not lazy. We roast in small lots, as always — because fresh means little and often, not a lot and rarely. The neighbourhood regulars come, the ones who didn't leave, the community that knows the market sells more than vegetables. Fewer people means more time to talk beside Golden, more smoke to watch, fewer bags — whoever comes in the morning catches the whole lot.
Want to understand why coffee roasted today isn't a shelf coffee? We explain the open-air, weather-driven approach in our roasting story.
When and where
You'll find us at the Marché de l'Abattoir, at the exit of the Manufakture car park, in Anderlecht. We roast and sell on Saturday and Sunday, in the Manufakture car park, in the open air, all weekend. No holiday hours. No "back in September".
The city can leave. August's sky stays to write. And Golden keeps burning.
The August lots are small and go fast — whoever wants to catch one knows where to find us: meteokoffie.com.
Brut. Sauvage. Imprévisible.
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