Despite war, coffee culture thrives in Kyiv
Roasters have even sent beans, ground coffee to the front
KYIV, Ukraine — When Russian tanks first rolled into Ukraine more than two years ago, Artem Vradii was sure his business was bound to suffer.
“Who would think about coffee in this situation?” thought Vradii, co-founder of a Kyiv coffee roastery named Mad Heads. “Nobody would care.”
But over the next few days after the invasion began, he started receiving messages from Ukrainian soldiers. One asked for bags of ground coffee because he could not stand the energy drinks supplied by the army. Another simply requested beans: He had taken his own grinder to the front.
“I was really shocked,” Vradii said in a recent interview at his roastery, a 40-foot-high brick building buzzing with the sound of grinding coffee and filled with the smell of freshly ground beans. “Despite the war, people were still thinking about coffee. They could leave their homes, their habits. But they could not live without coffee.”
The soldiers’ requests are just one facet of a little-known cornerstone of the Ukrainian lifestyle today: its vibrant coffee culture.
Over the past decade, coffee shops have proliferated across Ukraine, in cities large and small but particularly in Kyiv, the capital, where small coffee kiosks staffed by trained baristas serving tasty mochas for less than $2 have become a fixture of the streetscape.
Walk into one of Kyiv’s hidden courtyards and there’s a good chance you’ll find a coffee shop with baristas busy perfecting their latte art behind the counter.
Coffee culture has flourished globally — even in tea-obsessed Britain — but in Ukraine over the past two years, it has taken on a special meaning as a sign of resilience and defiance.
“Everything will be fine,” said Maria Yevstafieva, an 18-year-old barista who was preparing a latte on a recent morning in a Kyiv coffee shop that had just been damaged by a missile attack. The shop’s glass window had been shattered by the blast and had fallen onto the counter, but Yevstafieva was unfazed.
“How can they break us?” she is heard saying in a video, referring to the Russian army. “We have a strike; we make coffee.”
Before the war, Ukraine was one of the fastest-growing coffee markets in Europe, according to the Allegra World Coffee Portal, a research group. In Kyiv, the number of coffee shops continued to grow even after the Russian invasion, reaching about 2,500 shops today, according to Pro-Consulting, a Ukrainian marketing research group.
Volodymyr Efremov, a coffee roaster at Idealist, a major Ukrainian coffee brand, said his goal is to “popularize” specialty coffee throughout the country.
In today’s Ukraine, there is perhaps no better way to achieve that goal than with the army. Every month, Idealist and other coffee producers give the military tens of thousands of drip coffee bags — single-serve, pour-over sachets filled with ground coffee. These are some of the finest products on the Ukrainian coffee market.