The next stop on my tour of London's independent coffee houses was a café called Flat White. It features coffee from SquareMile, a boutique roaster in London. However, having just had a flat white beverage at LJ, I asked what the “long black” coffee on the menu was. Turns out it was espresso and water, commonly known as a Café Americano in the States – a drink I’ve never cared for, since to me it always tastes like very diluted coffee, with none of the interesting subtleties of its brewed counterpart. But I was told that I could get a cup of AeroPress coffee. This sounded more interesting, so I agreed. The AeroPress is a plastic cylinder that resembles an over-sized hypodermic needle. In the bottom a small filter is placed inside a cap with holes for coffee to drip through. Finely ground coffee is placed on the filter, hot water is poured inside the tube and the mixture steeps for about a minute. When the proper amount of time has elapsed...
(This is the first in a two-post series about a tour I recently took of some of London's independent coffee houses.)
For a city so long synonymous with tea, London has become increasingly identified with coffee. It boasts three large chains of coffee shops in addition to Starbucks, which entered the London market almost 20 years ago. Caffe Nero, Costa, and Coffee Republic each have hundreds of locations, which is remarkable given the size of the market. (By comparison, the United States has about the same number of large coffee shop chains, yet with about five times the population.) And as the London market has become more sophisticated, smaller independent stores have opened, offering different drinks and more sophisticated coffees.
Jeremy Torz of Union Hand-Roasted has been roasting specialty coffee in the U.K. for almost 20 years and prides himself on offering the finest coffee he can source from around the world. At the recent...