The sacks are stacked up to the ceiling. They're full of cocoa beans from Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, and Ecuador. A young man with dirty-blond hair, carefully dressed in a dark suit, is standing in front of a pallet. He is 34-year-old Managing Director Thomas Cotterell.

With his shiny silver hand probe, Cotterrell pokes into a jute sack. He rolls Venezuelan cocoa beans between his fingers. He handles them carefully, occasionally taking a deep sniff. Cotterell's company, which controls and houses imported goods like spices, rubber, coffee and cocoa, has been around for 122 years.

Odor counts

First and foremost, Cotterell is a cocoa appraiser. The beans come in huge container ships to Hamburg, having spent a week on the water.

Quality can suffer during such a long trip. Cotterell can tell from the smell whether or not the beans are still good. If they smell musty, then there was probably condensation in the container, and the beans have begun to go moldy. In such cases, Cotterell needs to separate the good beans from the bad.

The Cotterell family was historically what was called quartiersmaenner -- a job that used to be widely known but has largely died out. It would now be something like a shipping coordinator, and involves controlling the quality of imported goods. Cotterell's is one of the few families still in the business.

Signs of the past

Cotterell points to a black-and-white photograph as he explains how it all began. His grandfather, Harry Dougan, came to Hamburg from Liverpool in 1890. At the time, Hamburg's port was the largest port of entry for colonial goods after London. The first quartiersmaenner settled down in the Hamburg warehouse district known as the Speicherstadt.

Even today, more than 100 years after they were built, passersby can read words on the warehouse district’s heavy red brick walls, reminders of a bygone era. Names of shipping concerns like "Adolf Tiede" and "Eichholtz and Consorts" are etched in enormous golden letters on the facades.

Today, however, the storage of goods is no longer concentrated in the warehouse district, but in the port of Hamburg itself. The warehouses became too small.

Several years ago, Thomas Cotterell took over the family business. Today, he has 40 people working for him. Even as a schoolboy, he dreamed of becoming a quartiersmann.

'A normal job'

"There is nothing magical about being a quartiersmann, it is quite a normal job," explains Cotterell. "But only someone who loves the goods can do the job well."

For his part, Cotterell is known to be an expert at his job. He loves cocoa. He likes it when the cocoa dust tickles his nose. He adores eating chocolate. The beans that he so tenderly rolls in his fingers will become pralines and chocolate bars.

Cotterell is proud to lead his grandfather's company into the future. Even though his ancestors came from Liverpool, he considers himself to be a true Hamburger.

He loves his hometown. He likes the fact that it is so green. He likes to stroll along the Elbe with his wife, or ride his bike and watch the container ships as they moor at the docks. He says he can watch cranes for hours as they unload huge containers. Water is his element, and the port of Hamburg is his favorite spot in the world.