I stumbled upon this coffee shop a couple of weeks ago and I have been dreaming about it ever since. I have never in my life had such a beautiful cup of coffee and I’ve had great coffee all over the world, from Brazil to Indonesia. Granted, coffee is not my drink, I’m a tea person, but there is something undeniably different about Kaldi’s hand dripped coffee, it’s complex and robust with a suggestion of bitterness. It makes the Starbucks Americanos that we all guzzled on the way to work seem like a shadowy recreation of coffee’s true essence. This is the kind of coffee you can drink without milk and sugar, you wouldn’t want it interfering with the taste. Just as you wouldn’t spike your single malt with coke, hand dripped coffee from some of the world’s best beans is a thing of purity that mustn’t be sullied. In fact, I don’t even think they have milk, I certainly didn’t see any. They do give you sugar with your coffee but I urge you to try it without. A cool cup of water is the best way to neutralize the bite. Just like great scotch or wine, this coffee should be smelt, tasted carefully and swished in the mouth with brisk sucks of air to bring out the taste. You needn’t feel embarrassed, Kaldi is also a coffee school that teaches proper tasting technique.

Kaldi opened two years ago as an academy and industry consulting company and has only recently opened the cafe to walk-in customers. The owner Yang Dong Hyuk, the author of two books on coffee, “Coffee Science” and “The Worlds of Coffee,” imports the beans raw from Indonesia, Guatemala, Jamaica, Brazil, Yemen, and pretty much every other coffee producing region in the world. The technique of hand dripping, now hugely popular in Japan, is one of the basic and best ways to brew coffee. The procedure, done right, is actually quiet complex and involves precise temperatures and slow, calculated pouring. Along with siphon coffee, hand drip is slowly making an impact on coffee crazy-countries all over the world and could be marking the end of the espresso model.

Hand dripped coffee at Kaldi is not cheap, w5000 per cup (actually you get two regular sized cups out of one order) and is sold according to the country of origin. You can also buy the beans, w10000 t0 w15000 per 100 grams and they also sell all the gear you need to make hand dripped coffee at home from filters to carafes and hand grinders. The products are mostly imported from Japan and are a little pricey. Kaldi also sells tea and occasionally cakes and pastries. They are open 11am to 9pm Monday to Saturday and 12pm to 8pm on Sundays. To reach them call 53 257 2242. No English spoken.

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