Coffee

The Berlin Coffee Festival has been taking place this week, overlapping perhaps coincidentally with German Unity Day, the mild-mannered national holiday on which Germany celebrates its history going all the way back to 1990. As a coffee maniac, I have always assumed that really good coffee doesn't go back much farther than that. But a talk on the first day of the festival by James Hoffmann, the greying (39-year-old) eminence of London's coffee scene, pleaded to a young, barista-ish audience that coffee is actually a cyclical thing.

Hoffmann's venue was Ben Rahim, an impressive cafe that I was surprised not to have discovered before. I'll blame the omission on its seclusion in one of the pretty but tourist-clogged courtyards of Hackescher Höfe. The cafe, which serves coffee roasted by the company Hoffmann founded, Square Mile, is remarkable not only for its prices (several drinks are 7 Euros) but for its blending of Arab coffee traditions into what is otherwise a modern, facial-hair-intensive coffee shop. Along the bar, with its pour-over setup and espresso machine, are hammered-metal ibriks in which the baristas make "Turkish" coffee (the owner is Tunisian) that will, the cafe hopes, make you think again about Turkish coffee.

Hoffmann, who has a boy-wizard air, tortoise-shell glasses, and 100,000 YouTube followers, singled out Ben Rahim for having a story to tell, which is to say a culturally distinctive take on coffee. This might have been taken as flattery from a wholesaler to his most visible Berlin customer, but it felt convincing when you listened to the talk, which was really about the corruption of London's coffee scene by investment. In the cycle of coffee, as Hoffmann tells it, small artisanal producers enter with high ideals and distinctive visions, lesser imitators follow, and eventually investors eat up the market, cutting costs and leveling quality, until finally a new, annoyed generation enters with high, artisanal ideals, starting the cycle again. (Hoffmann alluded to other cycles: roasts getting lighter until they become "disgustingly" light, then darkening again, as they're now starting to do; the popularity of coffee in London, whose brief flourishing in the Enlightenment and the Beat period preceded long fizzles.)

Asked by a dry German in the audience if he must be quite so depressing, Hoffmann answered that the talk was about London as a cautionary example, a glimpse of a capitalized future that Berlin, with its lingering scrappiness and socialist impulses, might manage to avoid. Indeed, the talk felt almost like a proxy for the current discussions about housing in Berlin, in which ideas that a New Yorker or Londoner would find quaint—state expropriation of major property owners, multi-year rent freezes—are being seriously espoused and widely heard. Hoffmann's point, that too much outside investment tends to kill coffee businesses, seemed politely to pertain to cities too.

As I left the talk, my thoughts turned gratefully to the two cafes in my current life, one of which lies a couple blocks to the east, the other three blocks to the west. Though I drink coffee elsewhere too, these are the places where I know the baristas—in fact, each has only one main barista—and they know me. After Hoffmann's talk, these cafes started to look like reflections of what is special about Berlin, instances of a possibly endangered species of business that cannot be consolidated, businesses tinged by the air of artistic undertakings.

The cafe to the west, WIM, is usually staffed by a single Japanese barista who often plays Mozart recordings by Mitsuko Uchida softly in the background. The shop's premise—"weniger ist mehr" ("less is more")—applies to its menu (a few drinks and fewer pastries) and space (maybe five seats), which is extended, as in many Berlin businesses, by outdoor seating on the wide sidewalk; the street, which dead-ends at Kopenhagener Strasse, is quiet and tree-lined. On even a busy Saturday, Shoji takes as much time as he needs to make your coffee; once I waited about 15 minutes while he made cappuccinos for a group that had preceded me. When my cappuccino arrived, on its tray, it was as perfect as on a quiet Tuesday. As is common in Berlin, you pay at the end, not when you order, a custom that felt awkward at first (in my American impatience, I liked getting it over with, and in my parental distraction I worried I'd forget to pay), until I reflected on how indelicate the American practice must seem to some visitors.

The cafe to the east, Kajumi, is run by a German from Cologne, where he roasts his coffee; his parents emigrated from Uzbekistan. At first I assumed this background explained the colorful, folkloric-seeming tilework behind the bar, but Ibrahim explained to me that the tiles are actually remnants from a Jugendstil factory. His cups, in pale blue and yellow stripes and patterns, come from the workshop of a Bauhaus artist, Hedwig Bollhagen, and are easily the most special cups I have ever seen at a coffee shop. Ibrahim said that he chose them to make it so tempting to stay that no one would ever ask for their coffee to go. Now he realizes this was an unrealistic goal (school pickups, harried startup people), but even his to-go cups (reusable ones you pay for; paper cups are increasingly rare and frowned upon here) are superior in looks and design. On days of decent weather, he makes the sidewalk gemütlich by laying Persian carpets under tables and chairs.

Ibrahim, who was formerly a therapist for children, says people do their best work at something only for a while, before plateauing; he thinks he'll keep making coffee only as long as he feels he keeps getting better. His coffee, to my taste, is already exceptional, and he goes to crazy lengths for it, poking espresso grounds with a needle before tamping, decocting his own mineral-water solution to improve extraction. He's the only barista who ever gave me a recipe for water, handing me a ready-made liter of his special mineral blend, which he said would make the coffee taste different from tap or filtered water (it sort of did). But in his modesty, he thinks that if there's a difference he can impart, it isn't better coffee—there's already plenty of that. It's actually just in being really friendly, friendly enough that people want to stay and talk, as I often do, friendly enough that whole Kitas of children say hello as they march by, coffee drinkers of a still-distant future.