3/20/2023 0 Comments Caffeinated culture![]() ‘All these things coming together give me that Sunday feeling. ‘I order tea from a store I once visited in Brooklyn,’ he says. He bought the couch from a designer in Los Angeles and the cups in London from the New-Zealand brand Acme. And then I thought, if I like this way of living so much, why not make a business out of it?’ Jeff buys his beans at his favorite coffee roastery in Berlin. ‘When I’d go home, I passed by a café to drink a locally brewed beer. ‘I went out to have a cup of coffee every morning before work,’ Jeff explains. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Jeff is part of the creative class himself: after all, he has a big beard, studied Brand Marketing at the UvA, and worked in the advertising industry for eight years. It’s not just the coffee places,’ he concludes. ‘The fact that everybody speaks English is because Amsterdam is an amazingly international city. Instead, there has been a rise of high quality services, like the espresso bar, microbreweries and spelt bakeries. ‘The explosive growth of coffee bars’, he explains, ‘is due to the rise of the creative sector.Ĭreatives move to the city center of Amsterdam and so the infrastructure adapts to them.’ Manufacturing industries, Rath says, have disappeared. ![]() He believes that Amsterdam’s economy has changed, and its coffee culture with it. They come here to relax, or to get some work done.’ For Jan Rath, professor of Urban Sociology at the UvA, the rise of the artisanal coffee bar is not so much related to nationa- lity or the influence of coffee cultures abroad. And many work here, mostly at the Brouwersgracht. ‘Sixty percent of my guests are from the neighbourhood,’ Jeff says. On a table in the back, some young men are having a discussion over their paper- work. Together, they scroll through a Google agenda on his MacBook. 'The explosive growth of coffee bars is due to the rise of the creative sector.'Ī lady with a felt hat sits next to a young man with long blond hair and a bushy beard. Instead, at eleven o’clock, they leave the office, sit down, relax and take their time to enjoy a cup of freshly brewed filter coffee.’ Famous Japanese Instagram photographer Hiroaki Fukuda explains that the Japanese are different from New Yorkers, ‘because they don’t take coffee on the go, but sit down and relax for a few hours.’ Something similar is being said by Matija, barista at Cogito Coffee Roasters in Zagreb, Croatia: ‘Croatians don’t drink coffee on the go while running to work. This coffee is made with more attention than the average Dutch ‘brown café’ will ever make one.īut can we distill new coffee habits down to nationalities? Lying on the bar is a copy of Drift magazine, the brand new glossy on worldwide coffee culture that focuses on a different world city every issue. ![]() Is this image of the Dutch – stubborn about sticking to their old ways – correct? Do Americans and Australians really understand coffee so much better? Indeed, just look at the way Jeff prepares his next cup: freshly grinding 18 grams of carefully weighed out beans and pouring it into a pre-heated cup. 'They can’t all be unique at the same time in the same way, can they?' When they’re having fika, they’re taking a break and relaxing.’ Jeff, from Toki, contrasts this to Scandinavian coffee culture, where people enjoy ‘fika’: ‘Drinking coffee is more than just about taking a shot of caffeine. And another reason why there are so many internationals in all the new espresso bars,’ he continues, ‘is that the Dutch are really stuck on that cup of Douwe Egberts they’re used to drinking at home.’ They’re definitely more used to having their coffee in these kind of bars than the Dutch.’ Luc, who works as barista at Headfirst Coffee Roasters on the Westerstraat, agrees with Jeff: ‘The Australians, for one, have a much more developed coffee culture than the Dutch. ![]() ‘But even so, there’s a lot of internationals here. They encounter them while traveling in cities like Berlin and New York,’ Jeff, barista and owner of the newly opened coffee bar Toki tells me, while filling the filter of a Kalita coffeemaker. If you ask any barista why so many people are speaking English, you’ll likely get the same answer: ‘The Dutch are beginning to appreciate coffee bars like this more and more. ![]()
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