Yokohama 'Classic' Coffee and Tea

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YOKOHAMA, Japan

By Yumi Nakatsugawa

Japan embraced third wave coffee with passion, innovating and enhancing the experience with the enthusiastic support of coffee lovers.

Nowhere was this more true than Yokohama, a major port city of 3.7 million residents where Western-style specialty coffee and black tea became popular before elsewhere in Japan.

In the 1970s the majority of shops were small and personal. Owners experienced a prosperous period through the early 1980s.

A unique feature of these shops, especially in Yokohama, was the ability to brew siphon coffee at a pace quicker than pulling a shot of espresso. Innovators pioneered cold brew, scoured the world for superior coffee, and created various coffee and crafted black tea based drinks that required specialized skill.

In the aftermath of the bubble economy that burst in the early 1990s, these small sized, personally owned coffee and tea shops found it difficult to sustain their profitability. Soon self-service, lower-priced cafe chains replaced such cozy and lively coffee shops, particularly in urban areas.

Café Kaldi in Tsunashima, a Yokohama suburb, is one of the rare survivors of the so-called “Yokohama style” coffee and tea shops. Yoshiyuki Tanaka, the owner and one-man operator, was born in 1958 and trained in several coffee and tea shops in Yokohama before opening his own in 1982. His 53-square meter shop, located on the ground floor of a commercial and residential building, has been serving Yokohama-style coffee and tea for decades. Tanaka is a gifted retailer whose constant adaptations and refinement of a dying art continues to delight consumers.

“Coffee and black tea are fundamentally nonessential, luxury drinks,” observes Tanaka. Everyone has their own preference. No particular method or taste is absolutely correct, he explains. Success is as much a matter of style as quality. “Therefore there are various understandings and cannot be easily described. Each technique inherited over the years has merits,” said Tanaka. He relies on a siphon for basic hot coffee, and cold drip equipment to make cold coffee (some of which is served hot). He has developed 22 coffee-based beverages (11 hot and 11 cold). He aims to serve coffee with superb aroma and flavor, rich and full-bodied liquid, along with smooth after taste, without undesirable bitterness.

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Yokohama “Classic” Coffee and Tea

Cold drip coffee.

Highly regarded specialty coffee beans became more available in recent years leading Tanaka to begin custom coffee roasting using small computer-controlled bench roasters that roast 150-160g of beans at a time. Tanaka has been roasting his own beans since the 1990s and is still trying to achieve his ideal: a differentiated cup of coffee every day in all processes from choosing green beans, roasting, and blending, to siphon brewing.

Cold-drip coffee is popular at Café Kaldi, where the process takes 15 to 16 hours to infuse 2.8 liters of coffee. “Only the cold drip method can produce such rich-bodied coffee,” Tanaka explained.

In addition to eight types of hot tea served by the pot, Tanaka offers 10 hot tea and 13 cold tea drinks. On the cold tea menu, “Royal Milk Tea” and “Orange Layered Tea” have been the best sellers for years. Bergamot flavored Keemun tea is used as a base with 35cc of homemade simple syrup added to a 500cc glass. The syrup makes the milk or orange juice float over the infused tea. These days customers increasingly request that the sugar syrup be served separately, so they can control sweetness according to their taste.

Tanaka is pragmatic about the decline of shops like his own.

“I am not determined to retain the Yokohama style as a precious tradition, nor stubbornly stick to siphon brewing. Yet I still have a great interest in finding new tastes in siphon brewed coffee, and I believe there are ample possibilities in this method,” he said.

A masterful retailer, Tanaka is genuinely found of all aspects of the shop management. For years pleasing his loyal customers has motivated Tanaka to run Café Kaldi from 9:30 am to 10 pm each day, more than 355 days a year.

Café Kaldi Recipes

What’s on the menu at a traditional Japanese coffee shop? Here are four popular recipes perfected by Café Kaldi.

Siphon Coffee

Ingredients: 20g coffee beans

150cc (1 cup) fresh water

1. Pour hot water to the lower globe of the siphon and heat.

2. Grind the coffee beans and add to upper vessel resting on filter.

3. Balance the upper vessel loosely at an angle on the lower globe until water boils.

4. Once the water is boiling firmly fit the upper vessel onto the lower.

5. As boiling water moves into the upper vessel, pour boiled water from a kettle to the upper vessel. Then quickly give a stir to thoroughly saturate coffee grounds.

6. Heat for approximately 40 seconds to one minute, and stir again.

7. Remove from the heat source and wait for the brewed coffee to descent to the lower globe through the filter.

8. Serve.

Cold Drip Coffee

Ingredients: 500g finely ground coffee

300cc water (for mixing)

2800cc water plus ice cube (for dripping)

1. Mix 80% freshly roasted French-roast and 20% medium-roast beans in a lid-covered aluminum container for a week to mature after roasting.

2. Boil the water used in the drip extraction, and cool it down to room temperature

3. Grind the beans into super fine uniform particles.

4. Put the ground coffee into a bowl, add 300cc cold water and mix well.

5. Stuff the evenly-wet beans into the drip chamber in the coffee maker.

6. Pour cooled water along with ice cubes into the water vessel.

7. Place the apparatus on the shelf.

8. Open the cock to maintain a drip every three seconds.

9. At this rate it will take 15 to 16 hours to complete dripping.

Royal Milk Tea (cold)

Ingredients:

6g bergamot flavored Keemun tea

120cc hot water

35cc homemade “simple” syrup*

80cc milk

Small portion of whipped cream

1. Infuse bergamot flavored Keemun tea for two to three minutes.

2. Fill a 500cc glass with cracked ice cubes, add sugar syrup.

3. Strain the tea infusion onto the ice, stir well.

4. Pour milk gently over the sweetened tea, and let it float.

5. Squeeze whipped cream on top.

*Put 500cc of boiling water and 1kg of sugar into a mixer, and rotate the mixer for 10 seconds. Keep the syrup in bottles in room temperature. (He makes sweeter syrup in order to add enough sweetness to drinks without making them weaker. If this dense syrup is kept in a refrigerator, it becomes too thick.)

Orange Layered Iced Tea

Ingredients:

6g bergamot flavored Keemun tea

120cc hot water

35cc homemade “simple” syrup

80cc 100% carton packed orange juice

One orange slice

1. Infuse bergamot flavored Keemun tea for two to three minutes.

2. Fill a 500cc glass with cracked ice cubes, add “simple” syrup*.

3. Pour strained tea infusion onto the ice, stir well.

4. Add orange juice carefully onto the tea to keep them separated.

5. Garnish with a sliced orange on the rim of the glass.