I recently switched to drinking black coffee

I find it impossible to distinguish the slop of any US or UK chain against each other. However I recently got a shock, as someone who has been a coffee nerd since I first went to Gwilym Davie’s coffee stall in the mid 2000s (he later won the world barista championship), obsess over my hand grinder and water quality etc. only buy sourced single origin beans freshly roast by small roaters, I went to a chain here in Shanghai called Manner, and, well, had a good coffee. They have a weekly rotation of single-origin beans which guarantee fresh roasting and significant terroir differences. China’s now massive consumer coffee market is very competitive.

If someone want a sublime gourmet experience, has the right equipment and money is no obstacle, there is a farm in Panama on the slopes of Baru Volcano called Ninety+ that grows and processes exceptional small batch coffees, I’ve only bought a couple of their lower priced grades (Drima Zede is my favorite, about £12 for 100g), but they are incredible: Coffee – Ninety Plus Coffee

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@nontroppo, have you tried getting hold of any Yunnan coffee? If you can find it, to me it’s some of the best coffee I’ve had. The trees (Arabica) were planted in the late 1800s by French missionaries — as were a lot of vineyards in Yunnan.

The problem arose that, somewhere around 2012, Starbucks tried to get a deal with the Yunnan Provincial Government whereby they would buy up the whole of Yunnan’s coffee production to supply their ever-expanding chain of outlets in China. I don’t know if they succeeded completely, but Yunnan coffee beans became much harder to find; I knew an artisan coffee-roaster in Xiamen, from whom I used to buy and she told me about Starbucks.

:slight_smile:
Mark

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Yeah, Costa uses a blend with Robusta beans, which have a lot more caffeine than Arabica, but usually don’t taste as good

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Yes, Yunnan coffee is still grown and active, thanks to the insatiable appetite for speciality coffee here. This means a lot of planting of “high-end” varieties of Arabica over the last few years, for example the Gesha varietal which has become the most expensive Arabica globally. I occasionally buy Yunnan signle-origin beans from M2M, a roaster from Hangzhou where the 2019 world brewer’s cup champion, little bean works: Du Jianing Discusses Her Path to World Brewers Cup Victory - Barista Magazine Online – she won with beans from Ninety+

You can read some info on Yunnan coffee here. The quality is still a bit variable, so it is worth getting it from roasters you trust:

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I’m not from the UK, I’m from Australia, where our coffee culture goes WAY back before the US got it. In Aus every pretty much café/restaurant has a barista, (quality varies) no such thing as filter.

I’ve travelled extensively in my career (at one stage overseas 2 out of every 4 weeks), and sorry, but the Starbucks does not even get a look in. Starbucks was an abysmal failure in Aus. We want real coffee, not a chai latte, with hog snout milk, a sprinkle of fairy dust, coconut water, spray cream etc etc.

As for the vile, stewed filter coffee in so many American restaurants - I don’t care if there are free refills, it’s disgusting…

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As I’ve been in the UK since 2014 and I haven’t found any Yunnan coffee here…

But one friend who comes over regularly (from Guangzhou), occasionally brings me a kilo of beans, but of course I have no choice as to the roaster she gets them from.

As for that article, if the cost of 2,400–2,500 CNY a kilo over there is a guide, even if I could find such coffee here, it would be way beyond my wallet!

:slight_smile:
Mark

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That is an average for the upper tiers of single origin small estate speciality coffee here, around £28 for 100g. But at that price Yunnan will be competing against a formidable selection from Central America. The price goes way up from there! There are annual competitions, for example Best of Panama: http://bestofpanama.org – competition winners are auctioned off and prices can get truly insane:

Chinese roaster paid US$200,040.00 for 20kg of Natural Geisha from Elida in the 2024 auction, if we break it down to a price for a cup of coffee, that is $167 for a 16g dose, before shipping, roasting and any other costs!!! :exploding_head:

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And people pay those outrageous prices for tea; one year, maybe 2002, 20 grams of Dahongpao from the original 6 trees came up for auction… it fetched 200,000 CNY.

And there is one celebrated lichee tree in Guangdong the fruits of which in a good year are auctioned singly. Around then, one lichee from that tree sold for 20,000 CNY. The man who bought it gave it to his mother, who said he was very intelligent. :grin:

At the time the exchange rate was also about 10 CNY = £1.

:slight_smile:
Mark

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Before university I was a moderate coffee drinker, maybe drinking a few cups a week. In university I would drink a lot more 10-15 cups a day especially nearing exams. I became concerned when my urine became noticably cloudy so I stopped cold turkey and didn’t drink any coffee for six months or so. Then one day I went to the “Chatter Box” coffee shop and had a coffee. It was then that I realized what a pyscho-active drug caffiene is. I was high and my eyeballs were vibrating.

The best coffee I had was in South India. Why? Because I was living less than 100 miles from the coffee plantations and I was friends with several plantation owners (even my surgeon who operated on my shoulder turned out to be a plantation owner). All along the street where I lived were warehouses full of green coffee beans (Arabica).

My friend, the coffee wholesaler, was shipping hundreds of tonnes of coffee from his plantation to Italy.

I had a laugh when an Indian friend of mine who often traveled to Italy told me how good the coffee was there. She thought Italy grew coffee and was surprised to find out that the “Italian coffee” she liked so much was probably grown in India a couple of hour’s drive from her home. :smile:

Depsite the fact that S India grows fantastic coffee for some reason many Indians like a blend of 80% coffee and 20% chickory. They like the taste. I preferred 100% Arabica.

S Indians also have a distinct way of making coffee (with milk) as described in the video.

Since my wife is from the Balkans she taught me how to make Turkish style coffee as it was the Turks who introduced coffee to Europe. (It is said that when the Turkish siege of Vienna was lifted the Turks fled leaving a massive amount of coffee behind and thus Europe’s romance with coffee began).

She got me a traditional Balkan’s style coffee pot and I learned how to make it. This is very strong coffee. The Turks and Arabs like to add spices like cardamon to their coffee, so do I. (Cardamon also grows in S India.)

This video shows how to make basic Balkan/Turkish coffee.

I got into researching how different countries made coffee and stumbled on Vietnamese coffee which is one of my favorites especially in the summer for iced coffee. This link gives you an idea of what it is about.

The Vietnamese use condensed milk because at the time when they got into coffee under the French there were no dairy cows in Indo-China.

I made my own variations by mixing coco powder and spices into the condensed milk. My wife loved it.

But we stopped drinking coffee some time ago and don’t miss it.

As for the OP I would suggest, as others have, that you may want to get a medical opinion about your situation just to be on the safe side.

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