By SUSANNAH BUTTER*
Every sip matters. Ordering coffee has gone beyond choosing between a white or black Americano. It’s about scouring Instagram to bone up on beans and going on a quest across town to find your fix. Coffee connoisseurs would rather do without caffeine than compromise on flavour and what they call “mouthfeel”. Here’s the latest from the filtration front line.
The base
First tonic went haute because good gin deserves a classy mixer; now water is being zhuzhed up so that nothing obstructs the taste of the coffee. Hugh Duffie at Sandow’s Cold Brew is looking at “stripping out everything from water, deionising it, because removing minerals means softer water, with more space for the coffee flavour. It also makes equipment last longer because it doesn’t scale or rust.” This is useful in London, where the water is hard.
Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood has written a whole book on the subject, Water for Coffee. He says: “We need to see water for coffee-making as a solvent and ‘flavour organiser’. Water makes up roughly 98 per cent of a filter coffee but tasty water doesn’t make tasty coffee.”
This is a natural successor to the C and T, where tonic water is added to coffee to create a crisp, citrussy edge.
Milk
Next week, The Estate Dairy launches milk made especially for coffee, pictured. It will be available at Noble Espresso, Kaffeine and other London coffee shops and was developed with a man called Morten Münchow, who spent two years researching cappuccino foam in a study funded by the Danish government. Seriously.
Shaun Young had the idea while working at Noble Espresso and explains: “Milk goes in 80 per cent of customers’ drinks but no one thinks about it.” He worked with Münchow to find milk with a lot of protein to help stabilise foam and make it hold for longer. It is pasteurised but not homogenised, to retain creaminess, fats and protein.
Young says: “The dairy industry has had its difficulties but we found a farm in Lancashire where two sons had just taken over from their father. They bought a herd of Jersey cows from Denmark because it is the only breed that makes high-protein milk.”
The coffee aesthetic
How do you know if someone likes coffee? They will tell you by filling their Instagram feed with pictures of obscure places to find a cup of Joe and driving miles across London for one cortado in an isolated beanerie.
A typical post shows a hole-in-the-wall in remote Scandinavia that does a single-origin drip. If this sounds like another language you are reading it correctly — the coffee pointy heads have a particular lexicon. Usually their coffee pictures are minimalist, with a flash of background colour in the form of a cactus but occasionally they break out, like when Streamer Coffee in Tokyo did a bacon-maple cortado or had a coffee vending machine pop-up.
The pod squad
The latest step for coffee hackers is posh pods for Nespresso machines. Next month Pact Coffee starts selling its speciality roasts in pod form. Home brewers are also moving from cafetières to V60 and Kalita drippers.
Pact says: “V60 drippers make a clean and well-balanced cup because no grounds make it to the cup and it is easier to find the natural sweetness and taste notes in the coffee.”
The espresso dot
For those who like their lattes extra potent. The latte macchiato is like a coffee sandwich — the milk goes in first, then a shot of espresso, topped up with more milk and an espresso dot on top. It’s the most recent addition to Starbucks’s US menu but any coffee expert will tell you it has been around for years.
