Article courtesy of Maverick Magazine  

Extracted from: Vol 1, Issue 12, 5 Oct 2006

There’s an awful lot of coffee in the trendy vending spots of South Africa. And a lot of it is awful. But some is ambrosial – which requires a deal of knowledge and skill to achieve. Tastings by GAIL STRAUSS.

AT WIMPY THEY NO LONGER ASK IF YOU WANT MILK or cream in your cappuccino. In fact, you’re very likely to get a surprisingly good cup of coffee, even if some of the punters are still not exactly sure what a “mockee- ah-toe” is. And when the home of the bottomless cup of coffee starts dabbling in foreign, espressobased beverages, you know something is a-buzz in the coffee industry.

“People are waking up to great coffee,” says Mark Blanckenberg, affable MD of Ciro Alliances, the arm of branded products giant AVI that supplies the “out of home” – i.e. non-retail – component of Ciro and House of Coffees and includes Wimpy as its client, along with Mugg & Bean and a myriad other restaurants and “coffee-themed” shops, including just about every large hotel and casino group in the country.

“Specialty coffees have come of age in a very big way. People no longer want a cappuccino – they want a great cappuccino and they know the difference.” South African coffee watchers date the dawn of the decent coffee era to the late nineties, when TriBeCa, Seattle Coffee Company and, latterly, Woolworths Café entered the market, bringing with them a world of espresso-based beverages and signaling the end of the reign of the filter coffee pot.

One of the pioneers in this regard is Dale Mason, co-founder of TriBeCa Coffee Company. As a man who once called Seattle home, Mason did what any good addict would do: when he couldn’t find his fix locally he started making his own.

Today TriBeCa comprises two franchises and three company stores, with its own roasting plant where it blends a variety of 100 percent Arabica beans to create three different lines for the retail market. It is also the preferred coffee partner for the notoriously exacting Woolworths Cafés as well as supplying Woolworths’ house blend in its stores.

“There’s no doubt the South African market has changed dramatically since we started, although I still don’t see a market just yet for a coffee-only chain,” says Mason. “Good coffee is a great drawcard but you need food sales to pay the rent; we just don’t have the volumes to rely purely on coffee. I used to manage a Starbucks outlet in Manhattan, where we did 1 500 transactions a day, 80 percent of which were just coffee. In an average store here, you get around 250 to 300 customers a day in a good location. Sales of takeaway coffee are growing year on year, but so far it’s a tiny component of our business.”

Once comfortably in a league of its own, TriBeCa now faces formidable competition in the form of the Vida e Caffe, which models itself on street cafes of sophisticated European cities – in this case, sultry, sexy Lisbon.

The latter’s Cape Town Kloof Street shop is one of the most stylish espresso shrines in the country and is proud of the fact that it serves no tea. Coffee fundis in the Mother City are also enthralled by Origin in De Waterkant, which doesn’t so much have customers, as evangelists. In this coffee Mecca you can discuss provenance with the baristas, develop your palate with tasting sessions and name drop terms like “peaberry” (mutant coffee beans) and Kopi Luwak, the world’s most expensive coffee which owes much of its flavour to the fact that it needs to be passed through the innards of a palm civet before it’s harvested off the forest floor in pockets of Sumatra. Don’t worry, you’re unlikely to have drunk any by accident. It’s extremely rare, with only some 500 pounds making it to market each year at a cost of around £20 per kilo.

Then there’s the best of the neighbourhood coffee and cake emporiums such as Nice in Johannesburg’s Parkhurst, La Patisserie in Illovo and Queen of Tarts in Lower Main Road, Observatory; charming, exceptional, unique establishments straight out of a Joanne Harris novel. Like the chocolat shop in the book of the same name, they’re the stuff of dreams, not investment opportunities, and it shows. In America, concern over the fate of gems such as these, in the face of competition from the nation’s coffee juggernauts, has given birth to one of the most successful civic campaigns ever. Appalled at Starbucks’ domination of the New York coffee scene, a group of idealistic young Americans set up the Delocate project, a website (www.delocate.com) offering a full list of countrywide alternatives to the big coffee chains. While it’s difficult to imagine anyone in South Africa getting quite as excited over the proliferation of Mugg & Bean franchises, there are those who grumble about what they perceive to be Ciro and House of Coffees’ grip on the industry.

“There are definitely people out there who want to serve good coffee,” says an industry insider who prefers to remain nameless, “but Ciro has pretty much stitched up the market, making it very difficult for restaurateurs to try something from an independent roaster. “Ciro is smart. Many coffee shop owners are starved of start-up capital. So it provides the essential equipment and all the frills, such as pavement umbrellas, aprons, lightboxes and uniforms – and even prints the menus. It’s a compelling offer but it locks them into the Ciro Alliances stable, which includes brands such as Lavazza. Ciro also does the same for canteens, hospitals and offices, so it’s little wonder South Africans think it’s marvelous – it’s what they’re used to.”

Not so, says Ciro Alliances, which estimates it services around 60 percent of the out-of-home market. “It’s about relationships,” says Blanckenberg. “We don’t use the big stick to bind our clients to us – it’d never work. Coffee is a tough business and we’ve learnt over many years to provide a top class service to our clients. After all, if they don’t do well, neither do we.”

Currently the only company to offer nationwide support to its customers, Ciro Alliances is in the unique position of being able to service the full gamut of the extraordinarily diverse needs of the hospitality industry, from sachets for in-room use, to quality espresso beans for the bar and liquid coffee for high volume areas such as casino floors and conventions. The company, however, is at pains to dispel the “faceless giant” image.

Says Blanckenberg: “Our clients are with us out of choice. They know they can call on us at any time of the day or night, and we’ll have a technician out to them 24/7, no matter where they are, and considering they’re scattered from Upington to the South Coast that takes some doing.” While he agrees that taking on Ciro Alliances nationwide might be difficult for small operators, Blanckenberg says there’s nothing to stop a roaster from making a really big impact regionally.

No-one knows for sure how many coffee roasting outfits there are in South Africa, but one agent supplies at least 27 small to medium outfits with green beans in the Gauteng area alone. What is certain, however, is that they’re all fighting over a relatively small slice of the coffee cake. According to Sarah Kotzen of WM Cahn, one of the oldest tea and coffee agents and brokers in South Africa, of the 24.5 million kilos of coffee imported into South Africa, 19 million is destined for instant coffee, much of which will be mixed with chicory and glucose for the “affordable instant” market. For this reason, three-quarters of coffee imported into South Africa is Robusta – a hardier, cheaper and generally inferior product to the more expensive, but superior, Arabica varietals.

Robusta beans are smaller and a bag from the same crop can contain wide variations in quality – and often includes tiny pitch-black beans in amongst a mix of greenish, gray objects that look more like old tooth fillings than something you’d actually roast and drink. By comparison, a bag of premium quality Arabica beans used to make specialty coffee contains smooth, jade-green beans, uniform in colour and size – the result of a rigid sorting process, where the final selection is made by hand. You don’t need to be a connoisseur to know which is going to taste better. And this is where it gets tricky, because not all Arabica or Robusta beans are created equal and the best Robusta is better than the worst Arabica. Thailand, Sumatra and Indonesia produce some outstanding Robusta. Similarly, just because it says “100 percent Arabica” on the packet is no guarantee it’s going to be outstanding.

Although almost 80 percent of coffee grown around the world is of the Arabica variety, only around 15 percent of it is considered good enough for premium or specialty coffees. The fact that Robusta coffee beans are often used in speciality espresso blends in order to add body and taste to the drink has more to do with economics, hedging of supplies and historical tastes than actual necessity, says John Frater of Avanti Caffe, one of the first independent roasters to begin targeting the top end of the coffee market.

“It’s perfectly possible to make a fantastic espresso using pure Arabica, but because it’s cost effective to add Robusta, clever marketing has us all convinced it’s not only OK but desirable,” says the UKborn coffee producer.

Like many people in the coffee business, there’s something of the maverick about Frater, a former electrical engineer who ended up a coffee merchant in the central African country of Burundi. He partnered with a close friend, whose family had not only traded in coffee for decades, but was also involved with several plantations. “It was a seminal experience – a rare and fantastic opportunity to learn about and be involved with coffee at first hand.”

In 1998, political instability prompted him to swap the picturesque slopes of Burundi for a factory unit in Kya Sands near Fourways in Gauteng – a no man’s land of décor warehouses and body-shop repair outfits. In this unlikely setting, he set about targeting a nascent niche market.

Avanti only deals in high altitude speciality coffee. Their blends of Arabica all have one thing in common: they’re hand-picked and are mainly shade-grown Strictly Hard Beans (SHB) – high in essential oils and low in caffeine. Like grapes and cocoa beans, each growing region has its distinctive characteristics, and like wine and chocolate, no amount of skillful blending and roasting will disguise inferior raw materials.

“Over 80 percent of the work is done in the plantation. The best coffee grows at very high altitude in a narrow band around the equator – misty, temperate regions (between 18 and 24 degrees all year round), blessed with volcanically enriched soil and, in some cases, plenty of towering hardwoods to provide shade. The exceptional climatic conditions of the Blue Mountain region of Jamaica result in some of the finest Arabica around, but there’s equally good stuff to be found in areas of South America: northern Colombia, Guatemala and Costa Rica,” maintains Frater.

Africa is no slouch in the coffee-growing stakes either but, unlike South America, it’s not as geared up for producing premium coffee. “South American farmers are generally more single-minded about growing coffee. It’s invariably the only crop they produce, unlike in Africa, where coffee is usually only one of two or three crops attended to by small farmers. The pickers are extremely disciplined – only ripe cherries are selected and there are plenty of washing facilities to allow optimal processing of the beans. Without good washing facilities, farmers have to resort to the traditional dry method of processing, which essentially involves laying out your crop on the verandah and letting nature take its course. It’s extremely difficult to control and requires very careful monitoring if it’s to see the inside of a bag of gourmet coffee beans,” says Frater.

It’s a problem which a new generation of enthusiastic “coffeenistas” is determined to tackle.

“Coffee originates in the highlands of Ethiopia yet when people think of good coffee they automatically think of the Italians and the South Americans,” says Jonathan Robinson of Bean There Coffee Company, whose mission is to put Africa back on the premium coffee map, which means gearing up the growers to compete with the South Americans. “Mbeya in Tanzania is home to some of the finest Arabicas in East Africa. It has a distinctive citrus flavour and, although lighter-bodied than many other African coffees, it exhibits a wildly sweet aroma and delicate, nutty flavour with a subtle acidity. It’s a great coffee, but processing has always been a problem,” says Robinson.

Enter the Tanzanian Hope Project, an NGO that has installed washing stations in the heart of the coffee growing areas. Where water is abundant, traditional disc pulpers have been installed. Where it is scarce, eco-pulpers that need less water are used, and boreholes are drilled to increase the water supply.

Bean There is directly involved in the Hope Project and intends to initiate other such developmental projects across Africa’s fertile coffee belt. A cursory glance at its website tells a story of people committed to Africa and a better way of doing things – better coffee, better working conditions and better environmental practices. For Bean There, better coffee means unblended, single-origin coffee from a specific region and crop – the Grand Cru of coffees. True coffee snobs swear that once you’ve discovered single-origin coffee beans, there’s no going back.

But the best beans in the world are completely unusable without the roaster’s art. It’s at this crucial stage that the espresso men are sorted from the latte boys.

Commercially available coffee comes in four roasts: light, medium, full and dark. For hard core coffee lovers, it’s the last two that count. Anything else is for sissies and marks you as an amateur, or worse, a flavoured coffee drinker. There’s a huge amount of skill involved and, like wine making, coffee blending and roasting has its closely guarded secrets and petty jealousies. Roasters pour over each other’s handiwork, looking for oily, misshapen, chipped beans that break easily under finger pressure – all signs of problems in the roasting department. In South Africa, it’s an unregulated industry and anybody can set themselves up as a master roaster and package whatever they like under just about whatever label they can get away with. Capetonians, for example, would be forgiven for thinking Blue Mountain refers to the foothills of Franschhoek. Coffee shops and delis from Camps Bay to Constantia sell a Blue Mountain blend that you can virtually guarantee contains none of the pukka stuff. Genuine Blue Mountain beans are never blended, and if it’s offered on a menu, should set you back around R50 a cup. According to Cahn’s there are only two certified barrels in the county and one is two-thirds full in its offices.

Then there’s the whole packaging debate. Ideally, beans need to be used as soon as possible after roasting, and even sooner after grinding.

Coffee is a perishable product and to pack it properly is expensive. Oxygen and water are the enemies, which is why premium coffee is sold in expensive packets with a one-way seal, the little round thing that, contrary to popular belief, is not there so you can smell the coffee, but to allow gasses released after roasting to escape. For cheaper, polythene packaging, a good old pin-prick prevents bags from swelling, but it also means the oxidizing process begins even before the consumer opens the packet.

All things being equal, everyone agrees it’s the barista who will make or break your reputation for great coffee; which is a scary thought, considering that many restaurateurs still treat these sommeliers of the coffee world as glorified kitchen help.

It’s the barista who determines whether the crema (the white stuff atop a good espresso) is luxuriously smooth, or dissipates around the edge like scum on a pond, revealing a weak, watery offering. That’s assuming the beans are top quality – no one can create good coffee from bad beans.

To recognise a good cappuccino, look for the shaving-cream effect on top. If it’s topped with bubble bath, send it back. And, of course, if you see an extraordinarily beautiful pattern on top of the mousse-like foam, you’re probably in Scandinavia, where they drink more coffee per capita than anywhere else in the world, and to be a barista is a sought-after career option.

“The best beans and shiniest equipment are worth fuck all if the barista doesn’t know what he’s doing,” says Ian Ziervogel, whose brief but stellar brush with coffee has irritated a lot of people. There are, after all, few things more galling than having some newcomer waltz into the business, set up an outfit that draws fans from across town, and then get an offer he can’t refuse – all within two months of opening.

A mechanical engineer whose day job includes flogging laser machines as well as farming tracts of the Oribi Gorge on the South Coast, Ziervogel has been described as a man with a Midas touch. The shop that caused all the fuss, Nice in Parkhurst, is now in the capable hands of Carla Edgar, who bought it, she says, on condition that Ziervogel continues to roast the house mix, which he devised himself: a hugely-addictive, fragrant, fullbodied blend of premium Arabica coffee with not a trace of bitterness.

Excluding Nice, where would he go for a superb cup of coffee? “Home,” he says matter of factly, where he has since decamped, taking his fuchsia pink coffee roaster with him.

For now he’s not saying much about his next move, beyond the fact that it will definitely involve coffee “in some shape or form”. You have been warned.