Cafes and Coffee

It seems like wherever you go these days, be it Thessaloniki, Mumbai or Kyoto, there is a cafe that looks like a Scandinavian designer’s living room – sharp corners everywhere, brushed stainless steel, light colored wood tables and some ferns hanging around. Everything is minimalist, slightly industrial, and incredibly easy on the eyes. My issue with these places is twofold: First, the coffee is hot garbage. Second, the aesthetic and experience is alarmingly uniform regardless of country or continent. After slurping some sour espresso that makes you pull a face like the Warhead’s guy you start to wonder what sort of boring dystopia you’ve found yourself in. Is this the real endgame of globalization? Drinking under-roasted coffee in a milieu of subtle Earth tones and queerdos wearing oversized Carhart T-shirts ¹?

Let’s start with the actual coffee. A lot of these fancy specialty coffee joints sell beans that hail from single farms in Colombia, Ethiopia or even Yemen. They might even roast that coffee on premise! The problem is that the way it’s roasted and subsequently prepared does not result in delicious espresso or filter coffee. My suspicion is that a lot of people agree with me, but feel under-equipped or embarrassed to characterize their experience.

When making espresso, it seems like a lot of these places are taking all the right steps. The barista weighs out the coffee beans down to the tenth of a gram. Some places even go so far as to break up clumps of coffee in the espresso basket by poking it thousands of times with a WDT tool. Some places take the almost ludicrous step of using a refractometer to ensure that they’re extracting the correct amount of dissolved coffee solids. This doesn’t seem to help the fact that the vast majority of specialty espresso that enters my mouth is overly-acidic, and completely unbalanced. Any flavor notes are completely drowned out by a piercing, high-pitched tone of sourness. I think two factors are the main culprit here: “process” and roast level. By process I’m talking about how they remove the pulp from the coffee cherry to reveal the “bean” (really a seed) underneath. I don’t want to get into this too much, but there are two main ways of doing this: the “washed” process and “natural” process. Washed coffees generally have a “cleaner” taste while natural coffees might have more fruity or ferment-y flavors. I don’t like washed coffees. I think they’re generally boring, probably because my “palette” isn’t “sophisticated” enough to taste the “terroir”. Natural process coffees, on the other hand, rock; they are what got me interested in specialty coffee in the first place. Ever had a cup of specialty coffee that tasted reminiscent of blueberries? Most likely that was a natural process coffee.

The other factor is roast level. Specialty roasters love light roasted coffees, and for good reason. Over roasting coffee destroys all the lovely aromatic compounds that make specialty coffee different from the Folger’s they brew at church on Sunday mornings. The cup of coffee that first got me interested in specialty coffee was a light roast (natural process) Ethiopian coffee. It was fruity, like dried blueberries or cherries, and slightly pungent, like an overripe papaya. The fact that the roaster hadn’t burnt the beans to a crisp allowed those flavors to emerge in the cup. Light roast isn’t all papayas and lemon zest, however. While dark roast coffees are often described as too bitter, lighter roast coffees swap this bitterness for acidity. The lighter you go the more acidity and astringency ends up in your espresso. A good roaster strikes a balance between roasting light enough to salvage all sorts of yummy aromatic compounds but not so light as to introduce massive amounts of sourness. I am of the opinion that most specialty coffee roasters roast too light, especially with washed coffees.

In fairness to the specialty coffee world, I feel like this acid trip peaked a couple of years ago, with baristas and coffee nerds now (albeit very slowly) waking up to fact that light-roasted washed coffees sort of suck when making espresso.

Filter coffee at a lot of these places is even worse than the espresso. Here, I think the problem isn’t so much how the coffee was roasted as much as how its prepared. Most filter coffee I have at specialty coffee joints is too weak and too cold. Coffee isn’t tea, and I don’t like the sensation that I’m drinking lukewarm Rooibos when I’m slurping a cup of hot brown ². I don’t know where a lot of these places are getting their recipes, but the ratio of ground coffee to water should never be less than 60g/L, and the temperature of the brew water should never be less than boiling. I know some of you are preparing to post some angry comments in my non-existent comment section, but hear me out: Unless you’re doing a miraculous job of preheating everything you’re using for brewing, by the time your water actually makes any significant contact with the ground coffee, its temperature will have dropped to the point where you’re no longer extracting yummy stuff from the coffee. The other big drawback to using lower brew temperatures is that you end up with a cup of coffee that’s lukewarm at best. I feel like this is especially true in a cafe context, where the A/C is pumping and the barista has a million other things they’re attending to, meaning that your V60 just sort of sits around for a few minutes in a drafty room before you receive it. Maybe I’m a little old school in this respect, but I don’t think I should be able to see the bottom of a 250mL cup of coffee, and I like to think that I’ll burn my mouth if I don’t let my brew cool down for a few minutes.

In principle there’s nothing particularly wrong with the fact that many cafes serving speciality coffee offer up a very similar, almost substitutable vibe. In fact, it can even offer a modicum of comfort when traveling. Had enough Medieval architecture when you’re walking around Paris or Prague? Pop into one of these cafes to be greeted by a tattooed, possible Spanish barista and the sound of chic looking youths tapping away at Macbooks. Drink an oatmilk latte out of an artisanal ceramic mug while mindlessly paging through some impossibly cool fashion magazine. Gaze listlessly out of the massive glass windows while sitting in a chair that looks really nice but doesn’t appear to be designed with butts in mind. If you really like your experience, buy an organic, ethically produced cotton T-shirt with the name of the cafe on the front.

Like I said, there’s nothing wrong with all this, it just feels a little odd that I’ve had this exact same experience on four continents and countless countries. At the end of the day, I’m left wondering if cafes can be different, or play a different role in my life.

I feel like I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention two coffee experiences I’ve had this year that have nudged me towards feeling a little less cynical about cafes. The first is Subko Coffee Roasters in Mumbai, Maharashtra. Walking into one of their cafes, you might think that they’re operating one of those Melbourne/Brooklyn/Berlin/wherever cafe replicas that have popped up all over the place. Under the hood those folks are doing something super radical. First, they only roast and serve Indian coffees. Second, they are doing wild shit with processing and roasting. They have done more to challenge and expand my idea of what coffee can taste like than any other coffee roaster I’ve sampled. I have tasted Subko coffees that would be unacceptable to an American/Australian/European palette but are utterly delicious. They embrace flavors and textures that would be at home in Central/South Indian cuisine, but might be hard to find outside of that context. Fermented, fecund flavors like that of an overripe papaya, or tingly, sweet yet confusing bitter like a jamun, or creamy and pungent like a sitaphal. It’s hard for me to describe because some of the things going on in the cup are so unfamiliar that I don’t even have vocabulary to describe them.

Second is a handful of cafes I went to recently in Japan. While the coffee itself wasn’t particularly special, the environment and preparation method most definitely was. For example, in Kyoto we went to Cafe Yamakawa. They have a small roaster on premise and they have as many as 20 different coffees to choose from. None of these coffees are particularly light roasted – most are what I would consider to be medium to dark roast ³. They do not have an espresso machine. They only make pourovers. You want coffee for you and your two friends? You have to wait for some middle aged woman to prepare three pourovers. It might take 10 minutes. The cafe itself invites you to sit and hang out, but not to lounge. It is not spartan, but rather full of random stuff, including notes from 2nd graders on the shelves (it seems that the owner went to a local elementery school to do a presentation on coffee), books, roasting supplies, and lots of coffee. It is anything but sterile. The vibe is very much “sit down, enjoy your cup of coffee and then kindly get the hell out”. It wouldn’t occur to you to get out your laptop. This place was a refreshing departure from the Mel-Brook-lin cafe vibe. They are very much doing specialty coffee, but without the accompanying aesthetic.