NEW April/May 2013
BARISTAS’ BEARDS
Are you being served? Our furry friends become urban pin-ups. Page 30
T H E C OF F EE LOVER’S MAGA ZI N E
HOW TO IMPRESS WITH AEROPRESS
We’ve never had so much fun on a tube! Page 32
CURRENT OPINION
Turn off the tap and get the best from your beans with quality water. Page 26
FREE
250G BAG OF COFFEE FOR EVERY READER FROM YOURGRIND.COM
@c a f f e i n e m a g fa ceb o o k.co m /caffein emag www.caffeinemag.com
THE GRIND
THE COFFEE CO-OP Want to run a coffee business with back-up from the pros?
COMPETITION WINNERS
MONOCLE CAFÉ
Speciality coffee lands in Marylebone in suitably upscale style Quality coffee may be slowly moving into the heartlands of west London, but the reclaimed wood, bare brick and exposed lightbulb language of the indie coffee scene isn’t spoken here. After the sucess of his café in Tokyo and fustrated by his inability to find a decent machiatto in the area, Monocle Editor in Chief Tyler Brûlé decided to set up his own coffee shop just round the corner from the magazine’s London HQ. The café has a distinctive international flavour, with furniture from Japan and
Paul Witherden was the winner of our competition to win a year’s worth of freshly roasted coffee from eightpointnine.com (right). The winners of five pairs of tickets to the London Coffee Festival are Elizabeth Allen, Ewan Gilchrist, Jenny B, Gary Hamilton and Jess Perriam. Congratulations to all.
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Australia, cutlery from Denmark and coffee from Kiwi roasters Allpress. Downstairs acts as a members-only space for magazine subscribers, including a projector and screen for presentations and karaoke. The Monocle Café, 18 Chiltern Street, London W1. Open Mon - Fri: 7am - 4pm, Sat: 8am - 4pm, Sun: 9am - 3pm
CORRECTION In Issue 1’s article on New Zealanders in London, we accidentally credited a picture of Matthew Clark and Tubs Wanigasekera as Miles Kirby and Chris Ammermann, for which we apologise.
K ATE PETERS
Bean About Town is developing a concept around a new co-operative scheme for up-and-coming baristas who would like to make the jump from behind the bar out into the field, serving speciality coffee on the street. Many baristas aspire to have their own coffee shop, and cutting your teeth on a coffee cart is a proven path. Now, you can work on one of Bean About Town’s sites to see if it’s the life for you, then when you think you’re ready to make the leap, enter the co-op scheme and strike out as your own boss. Currently operating six sites across London and a special event branch, Bean About Town Managing Director Olivier Vetter believes the new model has the potential to expand into new locations. “The audience for quality coffee is bigger than ever before,” Vetter says. ”We need people with passion and the right philosophy to do it.” Vetter is also keen to remove as many of the boring and sometimes frightening business elements from the scheme for first-time entrepreneurs with an iPad point-of-sale system. Sales, stock reports and accounts are uploaded to the Cloud and sent directly to your bookkeeper and accountant, giving baristas the time and space to focus on what they love best: making really great coffee. Find out more at info@beanabouttown.com
THE GRIND
THE ART OF COFFEE mainstay in summer, while chocolatey, nutty Brazilian beans arrive at Christmas, and African coffees provide more distinct flavours throughout the year.” Presland also has free reign to source intriguing single origins for “limited edition” quantities. So if visitors look a little wide-eyed, it might not be from the art alone. Tate Seasonal Blend, £5.50 for 250g; Tate Single Origin, £7.50 for 250g, available at all the Tate coffee shops and restaurants (except Tate St Ives) and from shop.tate.org.uk.
Vincent Van Gogh once said, “To do good work one must eat well, be well housed, have one’s fling from time to time, smoke one’s pipe, and drink one’s coffee in peace.” The team at the Tate evidently took such musings to heart, for the gallery now has its very own roastery (a world first?), led by the knowledgeable and enthusiastic Benjamin Presland. He has forged relationships with small importers and estates to guarantee seasonality. “Fresh crops of praline-like, fruity Central American coffees are the
COFFEE QUOTE #2
“I LIKE CAPPUCCINO, ACTUALLY. BUT EVEN A BAD CUP OF COFFEE IS BETTER THAN NO COFFEE AT ALL” Director, David Lynch OUR FIVE FAVOURITE TAMPERS Toss that black plastic freebie in the bin!
CUSTOM
Reg Barber has to be the godfather of tamper makers. The base and handle are bought separately so you can customise it according. Choose from a flat or curved base, coloured or wooden handle, or even an engraved logo on the top. From £67 for handle and base, coffeehit.co.uk
BOLD
ANGLED
RELIABLE
VALUE
The Tiamo R Handle Coffee Tamper is defiantly individual. It’s designed to be held between your palm and fingers to give maximum pressure and comfort when tamping. Its looks can remind one of Marmite, but it’s sure to be a talking point.
The first adjustable-angle tamper allows the barista to tilt the handle to gain a comfortable position and reduce tamping-related wrist strain from an off-centre, unnatural posture. It is more suited to the professional barista, and currently only available in the US.
Great espresso is all about consistency and there are a hundred variables every time you pull a shot. The Espro gives a subtle but satifactory “click” to let you know you’ve exerted 30lbs of pressure onto your grounds, giving you a consistent tamp every time.
When all you need is a good honest tamper, this flat based version by Metallurgica Motta fulfils the task. It is light years ahead of anything supplied along with your espresso machine, and it won’t break the bank. Available in a range of base widths and handle colours.
£39.95, tiamostore.co.uk
$140, prima-coffee.com
£69.99, bellabarista.co.uk
£13.99, creamsupplies.co.uk
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THE GRIND
GREEN ENERGY
Sometimes, you just want a cup of tea, and this clean and fresh organic blend hits the spot In the Far East, boars are considered sociable, honest, and trustworthy. The same could be said for Green Boar tea, which ticks all your ethical boxes: it’s a single estate, pure Chinese organic green tea from Zhejiang Province in South East China (not a blend of African and Indian teas), wrapped in nonbleached, bio-degradable bags. At Caffeine HQ – where various members of the team were drinking it by the litre to recover from hangovers or get through the low-calorie days of the 5:2 Diet – the word that kept cropping up was “smooth”, for the tea’s most noticeable quality is a silkiness and body rarely experienced with affordable green tea bags, with no bitterness at all. In 2001 Green Boar’s founder, Henry Virgin, gave up a banking job to teach English to school children, labourers and managers in a small, polluted factory town near Guangzhou in China. The one respite from the daily grind for the workers he met were the teahouses, which sold reviving aromatic brews. Sorely missing their fragrant tea rituals when he returned to the UK, he founded Green Boar, which sources and imports organic teas (white, green, oolong, pu-er and black) from farms in China, Thailand, Japan, India, Korea and Vietnam. When you fancy a refreshing, healthy brew, hail the hairy hog! From £2.45 for a box of 25 sachets. Available from Planet Organic; for online retailers visit greenboar.com. Henry Virgin’s diary of his experiences in China, Teaching in Tangxia, is available on Kindle.
LEEDS: COFFEE’S SECOND CITY Independent coffee culture is spreading up and down the UK, with a lively scene in the North When the nation’s capital has the reputation for having one of the fastest developing coffee scenes in the world, it’s no surprise that pockets of speciality coffee are appearing around the UK. This is certainly true of Leeds in the heart of Yorkshire. Following initial offerings from Opposite Café and La Bottega Milanese came the chic high-end espresso bar, Laynes Espresso and Opposite Café’s second location in the Victoria Quarter. You can walk between each coffee bar in ten minutes or less, yet every one has carved its own niche. The latest is the wonderful Mrs Atha’s, a beautifully designed coffee bar with high ceilings and exposed brickwork walls that give this place an open but cosy vibe, while additional seating downstairs allows it to fill up without getting crowded. Mrs Atha’s pulls fantastic shots of Has Bean Coffee on an old lever machine, but isn’t afraid of technology: a Marco Uberboiler sits proudly on the side. A range of hot food is also available, including one of the best sausage sandwiches I have ever tasted. So next time you’re “oop North”, pop in to Leeds and allow yourself to be dazzled by the quality of the coffee.
NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK
LON D O N ' S B EST
Our round-up of London’s latest coffee shops
EMBASSY EAST
FREESTATE COFFEE
TALKHOUSE COFFEE
A trio of ex-Flat White baristas – Lee, Tommy and Chris – have set up in Hoxton Street Market with the hip and friendly Embassy East. The atmosphere is easy going and the coffee is top notch. A variety of Workshop roasts are pulled from a La Marzocco Linea or brewed in a Chemex or French Press.
Perhaps as a homage to its location, nestled among the Italianate columns of Sicilian Avenue, FreeStateservesadarkerroastthanyou’dexpect to find in most London speciality coffee shops. A wide selection of filter coffees crafted by well-establishedinternationalroastersmakethis café worth visiting time and again.
Good coffee in West London? It’s like a tired joke at this stage. But Portobello Road’s spanking new Talkhouse Coffee seeks to finally win over the West. We’ll see if they can pull it off, but in the meantime expect a lot of East Londoners making the trek to Notting Hill to support – or perhaps subvert – the cause.
23 SOUTHAMPTON ROW, LONDON WC1 020 7998 1017
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275 PORTOBELLO ROAD, LONDON W11
PHOTO: GIULIA MULE
285 HOXTON STREET, LONDON N1 020 7739 8340
THE GRIND
THE LONDON COFFEE FESTIVAL
JOAN TORRELLES
A must-see, whether you’re serious or just curious about coffee culture For four days at the end of April, the LCF hosts a fun and informative programme for members of the public and the industry. Always wanted to try a new coffee shop but never had the time? At the LCF, baristas from 33 coffee venues and microroasteries – such as Bonomi, Nude Espresso, Small Batch Company and Extract Coffee Roasters – will serve their signature cups to visitors in on a La Marzocco Strada. Do you drool over slick Italian industrial design? The world’s largest manufacturer of espresso and cappuccino machines – La Cimbali – is bringing equipment from the MUMAC Museum in Milan so you can experience what coffee produced on its machines tasted like in the 1930s and 1940s (very Rik’s Café in Casablanca). And if
you want to up your coffee game at home, the “Make Decent Coffee Lounge” will show you how. A highlight of the Festival is the 2013 UK Barista Championship, which tests a barista’s coffee knowledge, presentation, preparation and general ability (semifinals on Saturday morning, grand final on Sunday afternoon). Other elements of the craft will also be tested with competitions for tasting, brewing, latte art, alcoholic coffee drinks and Arabic coffee. Feeling peckish? There’s street food from around the world as well as an artisan market selling speciality cheese, meats, olives, breads and other foody goodies. Want to upgrade your Brown Betty or cafetière? Browse Alison Appleton’s stylish ceramics
– proudly designed and handmade in Britain. You can meet the makers from every aspect of the industry – more than 130 companies representing coffee growers, roasters, equipment manufacturers, and packagers. Rok, Mazzer and Pullman tampers are just a few of the big names coming. And then there are the specialty teas from Solaris Botanicals, Tea Pigs and Tea Nation among many more. At the LCF you’ll gain insight into how what we drink and eat arrives on our table, and feel just that little bit more connected to it all. Old Truman Brewery, 15 Hanbury Street, Brick Lane, London E1 (25th-28th April, 10am-7pm). Tickets from £9.50 (50% of all ticket sales go to Project Waterfall). londoncoffeefestival.com
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BARISTAS AT THE BLACKBOARD
Already a coffee professional or want to be one? In June, the Speciality Coffee Association of Europe (SCAE) is offering a new diploma. SCAE Executive Director David Veal has asked a team of professionals from all branches of the trade to update its coffee education programme. Divided into modules to make it more affordable and help participants study around their other commitments, the new programme provides practical and technical training from beginner to advanced professional level in green coffee; roasting; sensory and cup tasting; grinding and brewing; barista and business skills. Each module provides certification and all credits go towards the full SCAE Coffee Diploma. Applications are already flooding in from around the globe. The syllabus and course materials have been developed by such coffee luminaries as Paul Meikle-Janney of Coffee Community, Gwilym Davies of Prufrock, John Thompson of the London School of Coffee, and Ben Townsend of The Espresso Room. “When I tell them what I’m doing, some people say, ‘It’s only coffee’,” Townsend says, “but when I ask if they’d say that about wine, they understand. Several of us have been working in the industry for 10 years and there’s still more to learn.” Should you need to sit exams to be a barista? “I do feel that baristas are highly skilled, but they are paid the same wages as unskilled workers,” Townsend replies. “I’m hoping that our certification will help professionalise the job. If you’re paid properly, people tend to respect it; if you’re respected, you will be paid properly.” The courses reflect the cutting edge of current best practice in the industry. “If you’re serious about coffee you can reduce your learning curve by studying, so it’s a short-cut to career progress,” Townsend says. “Running a coffee shop has been hard work up till now because it hasn’t had a known career path. This new certification will help. I’m really pleased there’s harmony, co-operation and organisation at the top of the industry, not just individuals beavering away on their own.” Find out more at scae.com
CAFÉ SPOTLIGHT
!"#$"%&'( )"(*
For a taste of Australian brunch culture just head to Clerkenwell and experience sunshine on a plate, says Alex Stewart GLEN BURROWS
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SALVATION JANE
ike Lantana, its sister café in Fitzrovia, Salvation Jane takes its name from a poisonous plant introduced to Australia by English settlers. It has since become a tenacious weed, hated by farmers for ruining their cows’ stomachs. But Shelagh Ryan, the Australian founder of both cafés, has obviously decided success is the best revenge and given London two fantastic, and markedly Antipodean, coffee shops. Salvation Jane opened in Oliver’s Yard, just south of Old Street, in early 2012. The nexus of London’s flourishing tech sector, the area around Old Street is home to the digerati – the dot-com geeks, media creatives, and growing community of people who support these businesses by providing communal office spaces, work stations, and coffee. This “Silicon Roundabout” may not yet be the UK’s answer to California’s Silicon Valley, but the area is vibrant with a palpable sense of creativity and excitement, and it’s a very neat fit with London’s coffee scene. It was a desire to be different and imaginative that led Ryan to come up with a concept for this café-bar-restaurant and to choose its location. Lantana cranks out great coffee in Fitzrovia, but with Salvation Jane she wanted to innovate. “There’s a tendency for places to look the same,”
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she tells me, “like there’s a starter kit for independent cafés using Square Mile coffee and reclaimed furniture.” Instead, she wanted Salvation Jane to be “a different space – somewhere creative, quirky and exciting”. She recognised Old Street as an area with customers who would appreciate good coffee, which had the right context to make an interesting venture work and which could provide room for development. She wanted to bring the Australian brunch culture to London, with good coffee as a given and a menu that offered more than the usual artisan sandwiches or gastro-pub fry-ups. As Ryan says, “Food is where we can be unique.” We visited Salvation Jane on an early Saturday afternoon, and as soon as you walk through the door it feels like the sort of place you can easily lose a few hours to coffee, food, and conversation. It is warm, relaxed, light and, in the summer, breezy, when large sash windows open on to an outside seating area. Surrounded by the happy hubbub of friends meeting up, we settled into solid wooden chairs and I ordered a cortado. It was made with a Costa Rican roast from a Sydney-based roastery, The Little Marionette, picked up by a barista who liked it so much they brought some back to share. It’s not commercially available, and by the time you read this it won’t be there anymore. But they’ll have found something else you’ve not tasted before, which will be just as good. The house coffee is Square Mile’s Red Brick, which reflects the dependable and popular nature of the blend, but I really like the way baristas are encouraged to source new beans for customers to try – an approach that extends to the wine list and cocktails.
THE AREA IS HOME TO THE DIGERATI: VIBRANT, CREATIVE AND A NEAT FIT WITH LONDON’S COFFEE SCENE Left: A local carpenter made the small tables in the dining area. Top and right: Migratory birds are a visual metaphor. Below: The City Road entrance
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COFFEE AT THE MOVIES
STEALING THE SCENE
Turns out our favourite cup is a versatile character actor admired by the world’s top film directors. Jonathan Crocker presents his top ten movie moments where coffee plays a starring role LARS HUSE
Coffee’s a real smash in The Usual Suspects
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COFFEE AT THE MOVIES
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THE BADDIE
Very bad things happen in Fritz Lang’s nihilistic 1953 film noir, The Big Heat. It opens with a suicide. A car explodes with passengers inside. Two women are shot to death. A cigarette burns a bar-fly’s hand. But it’s best remembered for the most shocking pot of coffee in cinema history. As the pretty gangster’s moll, played by Gloria Grahame, argues with her sadistic hoodlum boyfriend, played by Lee Marvin, a glass coffee pot boils violently on a hot plate. It’s Marvin who boils over, however: he picks up the
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THE VERY MOMENT HE PUTS THE PIECES OF THE MYSTERY TOGETHER, HIS CUP OF COFFEE BREAKS APART, FALLING IN SLOW MOTION BEFORE DETONATING ON THE FLOOR pot and hurls its scalding contents into Grahame’s face. Horrific stuff. “I wonder how many women who’ve thrown hot coffee in their husband’s faces were very disappointed with the result and said, ‘Lang is a lousy director’,” the director later told Peter Bogdanovich. The terribly scarred Grahame
THE TRUTH TELLER
What’s more eye-popping than a coffee cup shattering on the floor? A cup of coffee shattering on the floor three times in a row. After spending 100 minutes interrogating The Usual Suspects ’ pathetic con artist “Verbal” Kint (Kevin Spacey), Agent Dave Kujan (Chazz Palminteri) has cracked the case and sits on his desk contentedly slurping coffee. Suddenly, one of the best twists in modern cinema hits him in the face like a left hook. The very moment he puts the pieces of the mystery together, his cup of coffee spectacularly breaks apart – falling in slow motion before detonating on the tile floor and coating his office with a hot cup of java. It’s such a stunning moment that director Bryan Singer replays it – bang, bang, bang. One of cinema’s greatest rug-pulls. And a right old mess for the cleaner.
takes revenge with a boiling brew of her own. The final line of the film is a black joke: “Keep the coffee hot!”
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THE CONNOISSEUR
4
THE TEASE
“Mmm! Goddamn, Jimmie! This is some serious gourmet shit!” exclaims hitman Jules (Samuel L Jackson), after Jimmie (Quentin Tarantino) makes him a fresh cup of coffee in one of Pulp Fiction’s most memorable scenes. “Usually me and Vince would be happy with some freeze-dried Taster’s Choice,” beams Jules. “But he springs this serious gourmet shit on us! What flavour is this?” Jimmie, however, is in no mood for morning chit-chat. First, he doesn’t drink freeze-dried coffee. “I don’t need you to tell me how ****ing good my coffee is, okay?” snaps Jimmie. “I’m the one who buys it. I know how good it is. When Bonnie goes shopping, she buys ****. I buy the gourmet expensive stuff, because when I drink it, I want to taste it.” Damn straight. Secondly, he doesn’t appreciate the little “present” that Jules has arrived with. “But you know what’s on my mind right now? It ain’t the coffee in my cup.” No. It’s the dead guy in his garage.
Bottoms up? In The Bucket List, Edward Cole (Jack Nicholson) delights in drinking a luxurious coffee
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THE CAFFEINE SURVEY
!',*%-&(. &(/%-*/0"%*1 It’s as important as the quality of your coffee, and what comes out of the tap just won’t do, explains our O2 investigator Chloë Callow
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WHICH WATER?
resh beans? Check. Grinder? Check. Scales? Check. Aeropress, French Press, piston or pump? Got it. You’re all set to be a domestic barista, producing tasty coffee in minutes, any time you choose. I don’t want to rain on your parade, but… Have you tasted London’s tap water recently? Not so good. As a result, even the most illustrious and expensive coffee beans will be affected by it if used to make your brew. I recently went to a cupping by James Hoffmann, owner of Square Mile and 2007 World Barista Champion, where he illustrated this point with great clarity. A range of interesting coffees were cupped in the usual way, we slurped and made informed comments. At the end we shared our thoughts on the different beans, then James focused on the last two bowls. We were unanimously enthusiastic about one – a delightful blend with notes of caramel, toffee and a little burst of citrus. The other? “Dull”, “mucky”, “flat” and “lifeless” were some of the words used to describe it. Then James revealed that he’d used exactly the same beans, brewed in exactly the same way. Only for one he
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used bottled water, for the other, tap. The difference was astonishing. It’s not just a matter of taste, London tap water does filthy things to your equipment. It’s hard as nails and will scale up expensive, state-of-the-art machines in the time it takes to say “Reverse Osmosis filtration system”. When water is the main constituent of a cup of coffee, it’s little wonder that coffee shops take the subject of filtration
nice coffee: it’s acidic, harsh and too bright, almost extracting too much of the coffee’s character, just as having too many minerals, or a high “TDS” (total dissolved solids), doesn’t allow enough space for the coffee’s flavour to shine through, resulting in a flat and muddytasting brew. The genius of ROs aimed at the coffee industry is that a small amount of tap water is blended back into the stripped-down water to a desired level. (An ideal range is 80-120 TDS, where there’s a balance between the optimal taste level of a coffee and a low enough minerality to prevent your espresso machine from clogging up.) My explanation is very basic, but essentially an RO changes the make-up of your water in a way that no water jug filter can. The latter can remove bad flavour and odour but does not significantly reduce TDS levels. An RO system is not really a realistic option for the home, however. You need to be a real connoisseur to have one installed as they require proper plumbing and are therefore not cheap. The other issue is environmental: as you’re effectively washing your water, depending on the system, you could
NO ONE IS HAPPY ABOUT NEGATIVELY AFFECTING THE TASTE OF THEIR BEANS WITH SUB-STANDARD WATER very seriously indeed. As James says, “A Reverse Osmosis filtration system (RO) is essential. I now consider them essential in a commercial environment, and if you’re opening or operating a coffee bar in London without one then I strongly suggest getting one installed as soon as possible.” An RO washes away all the minerals from your mains water supply, leaving very soft water behind. However, pure RO, or very soft water, does not make
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Association Coffee
The Attendent
The CoffeeWorks Project
Foxcroft & Ginger
HIRSUTE PURSUIT
!345!678/
Hot fuzz! A celebration of the ultimate barista accessory: a moustache and beard
G&T
Speakeasy
Milk Bar
AMELIA HOLDSWORTH
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Carmelite CafĂŠ
Nude Espresso Roastery
Terrone
The Fields Beneath
Protein by DunneFrankowski
Fernandez & Wells
Prufrock Coffee
Ozone Coffee Roasters
PHOTOSTORY
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Give it some elbow It looks a little unconventional, but the coffee passes the taste test
THE AEROPRESS
PUSH AHEAD It may be made from just two, simple interlocking plastic tubes, but the humble-looking AeroPress produces fantastic complex flavours and is a favourite with the pros. Joshua M Pattinson gets tips from the top on how to use one GARY SMITH
n the table in front of me are two hot cupping bowls with 12.5g of Caravan’s Hope AA from Tanzania and Square Mile’s La Buitrera Huila from Colombia. Beside me is Shaun Young, age 21, the current UK AeroPress Champion and head barista at Kaffeine. I’ve managed to steal Shaun away from his coffee shop in Fitzrovia to demonstrate the AeroPress and talk me through his award-winning method. “I’m using the recipe from the competition last year: 15.5g of ground coffee, water at 85 degrees, a two-minute brew time and 30-second press.” First, neatly set out your equipment: the AeroPress, paper filter, pouring kettle, scales and timer. Next, rinse the filter paper to get rid of any papery taste: measure out 150mls of hot water for this, which will also pre-heat the brewing vessel. Shaun has decided on the La Buitrera Huila, and weighs out 17g: “I use 15.5g for the recipe, so I weigh out a few grammes more and add the right amount later.” He grinds the coffee in a Mahlkonig Tanzania grinder on a setting of 5.25. “You don’t want it too coarse like a French press, but you don’t want it too fine like espresso. You want it somewhere in the middle. As I run my fingers through it you can feel those big particles but you still get fines in there, too.” Shaun adds the 15.5g of coffee into the AeroPress, taking care not to let the grounds touch the sides and making sure they sit level at the bottom. When the water comes up to 85 degrees he weighs it out. “I add about 35mls of water to pre-wet, and the first amount of water goes in nice and slow. I’m trying to saturate all the grounds so we get an even extraction, and as soon as it touches the coffee I start the timer.” As we wait for the coffee to pre-infuse I ask Shaun why he brews at a cool 85 degrees, where most people use water at 92-96 degrees. “In the AeroPress, 85 degrees is a temperature that works well for Colombian coffee. If I was brewing Ethiopian coffee, as I did in the 2012 AeroPress World Championship, then I would use water at 92 degrees, because those coffees like heat.” Shaun then begins to pour quite fast to move the grounds around. “I’ll use 250mls of water and pop on the lid to create a vacuum in the brewer.” For the actual moment of pressing he uses one consistent push. “If it goes down too easily then the grind size is too coarse; if it’s too hard, then the grind size is too fine. I press until I hear that satisfying hiss at the end.” We wait for the brewed coffee to cool down. “Probably the best thing about the AeroPress is how easy it is to clean,” Shaun says. “Just
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“IF IT GOES DOWN TOO EASILY, THE GRIND IS TOO COARSE; IF IT’S TOO HARD, THE GRIND IS TOO FINE. I PRESS UNTIL I HEAR THAT HISS”
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TRAVEL
!9#%"(:;/ <#*(= he final city on the frontier of Europe, majestic Istanbul has enchanted travellers for centuries. When you see the view from the Pierre Loti Café, it’s easy to understand why. Perched on a hill above the glistening waters of the Golden Horn (an inlet of the Bosphorus that divides the city), from its garden terrace you can see Fatih on your right, Beyoglu on your left and Asia on the horizon, while ships crisscross the Bosphorus below. Historically this part of the Golden Horn was called the Sweet Waters of Europe, a playground for the rich and powerful to escape the hot, narrow, muddy streets of Istanbul and show off their wealth. However, in the 1890s the city started to clean up and modernise with such inventions as electricity, and the popularity of the Sweet Waters faded in favour of areas within the European-dominated and fashionable district of Pera (now Beyoglu), such as the Grand and Petit Camps de Mort near the Islamic cemetery. The Grand cemetery became a favourite place for evening strolls, and the French novelist Pierre Loti became so fond of it he rented a pied-à-terre close by. While enjoying a sweet kahve at the Sweet Waters of Europe, it may seem odd that the Pierre Loti Café has ended up somewhere that
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seems a world away from where he was to settle, but legend has it that he summoned the inspiration to write his literary classic, Aziyadé, from this hilltop. Loti, born Julien Viaud, was a French naval officer and one of the best descriptive writers of the late 19th century. Many of his works were inspired by his travels with the Navy, which included spells in Polynesia, Morocco, Algeria, Vietnam and China as well as Istanbul. He was a champion of the Turkish War of Independence, and to show its gratitude the Turkish government
IN THE C17TH, EMPEROR SULEYMAN II WAS THE FIRST LEADER TO TAX COFFEE IMPORTS, GENERATING HUGE REVENUES named one of Istanbul’s famous hills Pierre Loti Tepesi (Pierre Loti Hill), and it is here that the café stands. The interior is very Loti. In the small tearoom the walls are covered with photos of the man himself, hung haphazardly. On the terrace outside the waiters mill around, taking orders in uniforms straight out of a history book, collecting glasses and coffee cups and whisking them off to the Iznik-tiled kitchen for a brisk wash for the next horde of visitors. Loti would have been
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proud of these touches, for he was an Orientalist, as evidenced by the photos and a delightful portrait by Henri Rousseau in which he wears a fez and traditional outfit. The café may be on the European side of the city, but the coffee is very Middle Eastern: short, sweet – often very sweet – and simple. In Istanbul, coffee is greatly enjoyed, but tea is the real favourite with locals, usually served straight from a giant samovar, where leaves left to brew for hours in a pot are diluted with hot water and perked up with a spoonful of sugar. It is surprisingly refreshing and satisfying, and something of a national obsession. Coffee was the Turks’ first passion, however, and a coffee house is a great place to start your visit of Istanbul. Coffee arrived here from Yemen by way of Damascus and Aleppo in the mid-16th century, and it was the Syrians who founded the first public coffee house in the capital in 1554 – 100 years before its appearance in London and Paris. In 1601 English merchants brought tobacco to the city via America and this combination of coffee drinking and pipe smoking became a hallmark of Ottoman society.
ADRIAN PEREZ, ANNA STROPHE, FLOWER XP, JOSÉ LUIZ BERNARDES RIBEIRO
The coffee shops in old Istanbul are a Turkish delight, says Matthew Corbin Bishop, who makes a pilgrimage to a favourite literary haunt
Clockwise from top left: Spectacular views of Istanbul from the terrace of the Pierre Loti Café, renowned for its well preserved traditional Ottoman interior
The coffee house would supply the pipes, the men would bring their mouth pieces – the fancier your piece, the higher your status, rank and wealth. However these commodities were controversial as their popularity turned people’s attention away from the mosque. Various sultans denounced or banned one or the other; Murad IV banned tobacco in 1633, on pain of death, while Muslim puritans rejected them as contrary to religious law. Then Emperor Suleyman II was the first leader to tax coffee imports in the 17th century – generating great customs revenues – and added a further tax on its sale, to provide that little bit more. It was these extra expenses, the loss of the south-eastern territories after the First World War, and locally-sourced, less expensive tea that turned the tables. But from the 16th to 19th centuries, coffee houses were the pre-eminent public space for men to talk politics, gossip and tell stories, and became intellectual hubs. By the 19th century
one in five commercial spaces in Istanbul was a coffee house, and there were about 2,500 of them. Today a good tea or a coffee is an affordable way to quench your thirst, relax and while away an hour or so. You needn’t restrict your visit to the Pierre Loti Café however. Stroll down the lush and peaceful path that winds through the cemetery that hugs the slopes – filled with fantastically carved, monolithic tombstones – and an idyllic area teeming with life is revealed. On the high street, busy stalls, cafés and restaurants hum with people, but one place is busier than the rest: the Eyup Sultan Mosque. When Sultan Mehmed II conquered Istanbul in 1453, one of his first orders was to build this mosque, named after Abu Ayyub al-Ansari, the standard bearer of the Prophet Muhammad, who fell before the walls of Constantinople during the Arab siege of the 7th century. It is so popular, it is almost impossible to get more than a fleeting glimpse of his tomb. However, it is a joy to explore the area around the mosque, so use a coffee as an excuse to get away for a few hours to see another side of Istanbul. Pierre Loti Café, Gumussuyu Balmumcu Sik 1, Eyüp, Istanbul. British artist Matthew Corbin Bishop is represented by Rose Issa Projects (roseissaprojects.com). His paintings are currently on show in “Revealed: Government Art Collection” at the Ulster Museum until 9 June.
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ARABIAN COFFEE: SAHWAH KHALEEJIA
Did tales of cafés in old Istanbul tickle your tastebuds? Sarah Al-Hamad explains how to re-create an aromatic, nostril-twitching brew at home Coffee, or gahwah, is a symbol of Arabian hospitality, a welcome drink at gatherings in the majlis or diwan. Khaleeji coffee is amber-coloured and scented with cardamom and saffron. It is poured into small enamel or ceramic cups from a large brass dallah – a gleaming coffee pot with a long, curved spout. Unlike other blends of coffee, dates are offered instead of sugar. There is a ritual to drinking this coffee. The pourer, al-maghawi, holds the dallah in their left hand, pouring long streams of hot coffee into a stacked tower of cups held in their right. The guest takes the cup in their right hand, never the left. Only a small amount of liquid, about a third of the cup, is poured each time, and top-ups continue until the guest signals to stop by gently shaking the cup from side to side.
Method
• Place 2 cardamom pods, 2 cloves, ½ tsp of saffron strands (about 2 pinches), 1 tsp ground cardamom and 1 tbsp of rosewater in a dallah (available at all Middle Eastern grocery stores). • Bring 750ml (1½ pints) of water and 2 tsp roasted ground coffee to a boil over a medium heat and cook for 1 minute. • Carefully and gradually pour the coffee liquid – not the residue – into the dallah. Allow to infuse for 10 minutes or so before serving. Do not shake, as this will stir up the coffee grains. • Pour into coffee cups and serve with dates. Writer and photographer Sarah Al-Hamad is the author of Cardamom and Lime: Recipes from the Arabian Gulf (£9.99, New Holland Publishers) and the forthcoming Sun Bread and Sticky Toffee: Date Desserts from Everywhere (£17.70, Interlink Books).