Yunnan coffee
I was interested to see this article pop up on Radio NZ this morning: China's booming coffee scene is challenging Kiwi ideas about the perfect brew.
There are really two parts to this:
Wow! China is a coffee producer!
China has been developing its own coffee culture!
Yes, and yes.
Back when I lived in Changsha, 1999 - 2000, a friend introduced me to Yunnan coffee - standard 250 gram vaccuum-sealed bricks of coffee, hard to find, but available in certain markets and supermarkets. When I moved up north I couldn't find it in Taiyuan, but it was stocked in the Friendship Store in Beijing. Yunnan coffee kept me going for a few years.
But time brought a greater variety of coffees more easily available.
I remember finding a few cafes in Changsha. A few? Maybe only a couple. They had quite an ingenious way of brewing coffee using flasks that looked like they were diverted from a high school chemistry lab. They'd suspend these flasks over an open flame, and the water would boil and bubble up from the bottom flask into the one above, then filter back down through the coffee. It was quite an elaborate set-up, but it worked. And actually, what came out of it was pretty good.
Starbucks opened its first store in China in Beijing in 1999. I very much doubt that had any influence on the coffee scene I saw in Changsha that same year.
I don't remember finding any decent coffee in Taiyuan. Instant coffee, yes. And of course there were a few fancy hotels aimed at international business people and development officials - I'm sure they had some reasonable coffee, but that's not my scene1
Beijing, of course, was different. Beijing has everything, you see. When I moved there you could easily get a decent cup of coffee in those parts of the city that had long been set up to serve the people who would need a decent cup of coffee. Other areas were still morphing in to their future hipster or foreign student roles, and so still had some catching up to do. And of course, most of the city is just regular China. I saw people put instant coffee into an espresso machine. I saw people serving up filter coffee that was little more than darkly-coloured water.
In fact, I spent a few minutes sitting in a cafe just outside Donghuamen, the east gate of the Forbidden City, watching as two German tourists tried to argue that they should not have to pay for their coffee because it was just darkly-coloured hot water. They tried to enlist my help. I don't think they were happy when I responded something along the lines of, "You're in China, you ordered coffee, what did you expect?"
After I moved down to the southern end of Chaoyang District, towards the southeast of Beijing, I found a pretty good cafe at the Soho up where Xidawang Lu meets Jianguo Lu2, just west of the monstrous interchange at Sihui Qiao. I spent quite a bit of time there. Money, too.
One last point: Yunnan isn't the only Chinese province where coffee is grown. Hainan grows coffee, too. I don't remember drinking any Hainanese coffee, but if they grow coffee as well as they grow yellow chillies, that'll be awesome stuff. It wouldn't at all surprise me to find coffee also being grown in the provinces between Yunnan and Hainan - Guizhou, Guangxi, and Guangdong.
Anyway, strange as it will sound to some, I do recommend Chinese-grown and -roasted coffee. It's good stuff. Also, New Zealand needs to drop the obsession with giant hulking steaming hissing espresso machines and their accomplice coffee grinders and try some simpler, subtler, quieter ways to brew coffee.