Ken Smith At Large
Festival suggests good coffee will attract more enthusiasts. But maybe not everyone will be converted.
AThe coffee has to be good. Not knowing your arabica beans from your robusta is on par with a whisky drinker not knowing his grain from his malt.
GLASGOW south-sider, visiting friends in the west end, bent down to talk to their little four-year-old son who was running around making huffing, puffing and hissing sounds. “Are you a wee train?” she asked him. “No,” he replied. “A coffee maker.”
Leaving aside the pretentiousness of the west end, it does show that coffee, once simply spooned from a jar of instant, is being rediscovered as a thing of beauty to be carefully cherished.
On Saturday the inaugural Glasgow Coffee Festival was held in the Briggait – the fine old fishmarket building near the Clyde which, once the fish merchants moved out, limped along as a shopping arcade for a few years before a further redevelopment turned it into workshops and offices for the creative industries, with a large exhibition space below its high glass roof.
Now it might sound as though it is on par with watching paint dry, but I stood there watching a chap making a cup of coffee.
In fact there were dozens of folk watching. I’ve been to football matches with smaller crowds.
But he’s not just putting on a kettle. He is using one of these bright red and shiny chrome espresso machines from La Spaziale in Italy. It looks like the Ferrari of coffee machines, which is a fair comparison as it almost costs as much as a second-hand sports car. About £6000 for the one he is twirling, pushing and patting. He is also wearing a head microphone so that he can talk us through the various stages.
This is a theatrical production. The coffee is measured with precision, with a tiny pinch or two removed until he is satisfied. We learn where the beans were grown, the quality of the water, the type of glasses he is using. Judges are walking around him with clipboards scribbling away long before they eventually get round to tasting the coffee. You sense you are in the presence of an artist.
The observers include a lot of men, and not men just dragged along by their partners. Many have beards – not the straggly beards of folk singers, but the carefully clipped full beards of hipsters. Many wear jumpers to show they are not trying to be cool, but in doing so are inevitably cool. It is hard work being fashionably unfashionable. Or is it unfashionably fashionable? I’m not quite sure. But they do like their coffee.
It might fly in the face of Glasgow stereotypes, but many young people would rather hang out in a coffee shop than in a pub with their friends. And the coffee has to be good. Not knowing your arabica beans from your robusta is on par with a whisky drinker not knowing his grain from his malt.
In the middle of all this coffee worshipping is the effervescent Lisa Lawson, who started up her own roasting company near the River Clyde, Dear Green Coffee Roasters, who is on a mission to educate coffee drinkers to the intricate flavours of good coffee. “Spreading the coffee love,” as she put it. She educated me immediately by telling me coffee beans are a type of cherry.
Her love of coffee came from a trip to Australia 14 years ago when she ended up roasting coffee for a company set up in a garage.
When her visa ran out she returned to Coatbridge, but never lost her love of good coffee which is why she took the plunge to buy roasting machines, and resource beautiful beans from around the world, ensuring an ethical standard of pay so that the cash goes to the actual farmers.
She has visited Ethiopia, Mexico and Guatemala to meet the farmers herself.
“Mum never really drank coffee,” she recalls. “The percolator was brought out at Christmas, and the smell was amazing, but it was only used on special occasions.”
She praises the coffee chains for raising the awareness of coffee, but is not won over by the actual coffee they produce.
“An American-style pint of milk – not my thing,” she explained.
Many agree with her which is why there is a steady growth of independent coffee shops where the owners and staff take great pride over what they produce.
To be fair to Glasgow, this is not the city’s first romance with the drink. Coffee shops date back to 1678.
The busiest was in the now demolished Tontine Hotel near the Trongate where tobacco lords went for news of shipping, markets and unrest. It was called the Tontine Hotel as it was built by a tontine – a group of investors who would pass on the shareholding to the remaining members until one old lady who lived to her nineties inherited it before dying a few months later.
Her clever father had made her a shareholder when she was a baby.
Another Glasgow claim to coffee fame was Camp Coffee, that dark liquid of coffee, sugar and chicory, which was developed in 1876 so that the Gordon Highlanders could make coffee when fighting abroad.
The original label had a Sikh serving coffee to a Gordon Highlander officer. Now the label has the Sikh and the officer sitting down together having coffee. Progress is a wonderful thing.
Other coffee producers such as Thomsons and Matthew Algie continued to roast coffee in the city even when it was overtaken by tea as the hot drink of choice.
The enthusiasm at the coffee festival suggests good coffee will attract many more enthusiasts.
But maybe not everyone will be converted.
I remember the Glasgow businessman out for lunch who had gulped his way through two bottles of wine with his companion before the waitress asked if he would like a coffee. “No thanks,” he replied. “I find it keeps me awake in the afternoon.”