Caffeine Around the World

In the many countries that we have been to we've found that each has its own unique (or at least different) style of coffee. Some we've loved, others we haven't, but I thought I should share some with you to help broaden your horizons past pumpkin spice lattes.                                       

While you may peg the Kiwis as more of the tea-drinking crowd, which they certainly are. (At one point during our travels in New Zealand a man from the neighboring hotel room knocked on our door at 10 pm asking "Did they give ya any te? They didn't give us no te!" We gave him some of ours and he left). They also take pride in their high coffee standards, and I would definitely say that the average coffee in New Zealand is much better than that in the U.S. They seem to have not invented grey diner sludge yet.

We enjoyed their quality cappuccinos and tried the New Zealand classic: a "Flat White." Basically a latte without the foam, we found it to be, well...not bad but missing the best part of a latte.

                                         

Now we're going to skip all the way to my personal favorite coffee destination—Vietnam. The Vietnamese somehow manage to start their markets at 5 am, work all day, start the night markets at 9 pm and continue till 2 am, then go to a "women's market" at 3 am (when the kids are in bed). Perhaps this is due to the near-magical effects of their coffee, which has nearly double the amount of caffeine compared to your American coffee.

The Vietnamese are traditionally more tea drinkers than coffee drinkers, as Vietnam is the 7th largest tea producer in the world. We got to try some of their highest quality tea, straight from the plantation, which I found to be good but so bitter that water tasted like a soda afterward. However, since coffee was introduced during the French occupation of Vietnam, it has been accepted into their culture and is now a key part of Vietnamese life, especially in the cities.

Perhaps the largest difference between Vietnamese and American coffee is the bean they start with. Robusta beans, as opposed to arabica, have nearly double the caffeine content and are popular in Asian countries. Coffee snobs claim that robusta beans lack arabica's "complexities and depth of flavor." I believe robusta has that beat—robusta beans are fried in butter at the plantation to help even out color and ripeness, which is evident in their flavor.

Vietnamese coffee is usually sweeter than Western varieties, often featuring sweetened condensed milk as a key ingredient in coffee drinks. It is often drunk on ice due to the extreme heat and has many unusual varieties such as egg coffee and salted coffee. Egg coffee was one of my favorites, which was invented during a milk shortage and uses an egg foam. Salted coffee is a relatively new Hue staple, which is robusta espresso topped with salted cream. It reminded me of salted caramel.

In much of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Greece, Turkish coffee is the staple due to the long ago Ottoman occupation of the region. Made by boiling water mixed with coffee grounds (and sugar in Greece), one of the key features of Turkish coffee is the unstrained grounds that remain in the coffee. 

The above picture shows a traditional Bosnian coffee set, which is made of copper and has many important little parts, especially the džezva, a little coffeepot that you carefully pour from to keep the grounds out of the cup. Unfortunately, after misreading a Rick Steves guide, the Petersons took a near-opposite approach to Bosnian coffee—swirling it to keep the grounds in suspension, to make sure we got every bit! Wow, yeah that was not good. The baklava made up for it though!

We got a second try at Turkish coffee in Greece, and we luckily had some Athenian locals helping us out during the process. The results were much better than our Bosnian disaster. We found that Turkish coffee smells way different from American coffee—less sweet and more like coffee grounds. We still thought that there was too much grounds in the coffee (we kept ending up with mouths full of grounds), and recommended coffee filters.

 

While we didn't love traditional Greek coffee, we definitely appreciated their tall, sweet freddo cappuccinos (basically iced cappuccinos brewed with sugar), during the hot days on Sifnos. Shout out to Aleph for making it all the way over to Greece to spend a week with us! Aleph, we had a great time, and we miss you already. We'll make sure to bring you back some yogurt face cream!