How we drank beverages; I am a hamster
New York Coffee, the best thing in your inbox today.
Today’s newsletter:
when did we start drinking… everything?
the first in the “faraway” coffee shop features (flushing)
coffee paste, in a tube! Like nature intended.
café pop-up (for a long-ish term stay) and new cafés
new, secret music from local artists
We’ll start with the last, just a taste:
A quick and interesting history on drinks
This is from “Tastemazing”, who researched the dates we started drinking…well, drinks.
It’s obvious, but really amazing to see the culmination of humanity’s drinks laid out bare like this. After a certain time period, and into what we call civilization, each of these advancements led to some major change, often political and very often geopolitical.
Corn (and the sugar we get from it), wheat, and dairy are crops that completely revolutionized America, feeding the rapid growth of the east coast and creating a reliance on all three (and meat) in America & Britain that still exists today. Rules are made to secure resources based on these drinks, drinks are made and to dominate, lobby to create rules.
How many things need to get boiled and pummeled and ground and juiced before we got coffee?
The answer: all of them.
And here’s us, pummeling, boiling, grinding, juicing to get the next thing in coffee—a new grind size, a new recipe [with jam!], a new way of delivering that coffee.
Today’s recipe is actually that last one! I’m excited (and equally afraid) to try it.
This week’s coffee shop spotlight!
A new café (with actual hype!) in flushing, a kind of desert for specialty coffee. Flushing, despite not having much in the ways of expected NYC commodities, such as pizza, bagels, and coffee, more than makes up for it in east asian food, namely all regions of Chinese, and Korean. There’s also pretty much anything else you can imagine.
So, a café there getting hype on instagram/TikTok is pretty rare.
3 little pigs is a comfortable place, made by someone with taste in coffee and pretty good taste for thrifty design. It’s got a big menu, which is a little more common in flushing because interesting drinks will outcompete ‘regular’ ones that taste great. For example, there are plenty of amazing bubble tea places, but only the one run like a michelin-star kitchen is the one with a 30 minute wait (it’s not better than the great ones nearby, but this one is good enough to wait for, at least once).
I got the dalgona coffee (iced), because it was a deliriously hot day (as they all seem to be), and it tasted like it does.
I needed something to help explore flushing and make me want to come back, but I found myself thinking about the other cafés there instead, and despite passing it a few more times I never got coffee there again.
The obvious thing is to think “why did this newsletter claim it was well-thought out?” It’s because of the signs on the wall telling customers about farmers and how their coffee impacts their lives, and their rotating line of coffees that you can order.
Yemeni coffee is such an important thing, historically and in the present. If you don’t know why yet, keep following this newsletter, a multi-part Yemeni coffee celebration and history is coming soon. If you check out the picture on the left, 3 Little Pigs donates three dollars of each bag of Yemeni coffee they sell to Yemen-focused charities, which is a huge amount off their profit for the bag [it’s much better than a clothing delivery I used to get which would donate a whopping $1 to the cause per $70 box]
Break time!
I met Charlie and Cassidy at Qahwah House, and they are following this newsletter with no idea their first read is going to have a small feature about them. I love NY musicians and even a million listens would not be enough for these, so let’s get them on blast.
Here’s a few songs I picked from their Spotifys.
(Charlie has a lot of collabs shared here, he is the guitarist)
I’ve also added these to the New York Coffee official playlist, here:
And now…
New Cafés
The new kid on the block is Dialogue NYC in LES — pretty exterior, painted brick to seem rustic interior, and is the sister of subtext nyc. It will become a bar at night pending a liquor license. Despite some hype around another flower shop + café, I don’t actually see a lot of flowers for sale in their instagram.
CASASALVO opened a few days ago in UWS — Italian, cheap like MATTO, and is opening a large number of cafés for a chain I haven’t heard of yet.
Dogwood Cafe pop-up near Washington Square Park, at Figure Eight — serving things like salted duck yolk croissants, pineapple buns, and black sesame sweet cream cold brew. More for food than coffee, but [most of] the food looks pretty good.
Happier Grocery appears to be some sort of NYC Erewhon; they have recently opened and they have a café. “With a focus on discovery, creativity, and life-affirming nutrition”. What?
Nabala café, a Palestinian-owned café recently opened near the Met Cloisters — it showcases art on the wall, a community bookshelf, and cardamom cold brew. It’s also got a nice couple tables to get work done.
I like my coffee pasted, in a tube, I am a hamster
Recipe time!
The wonderful team at “No Normal Coffee” sent me way too much coffee so I could try it and make a recipe.
Briefly, No Normal Coffee is a tube made of aluminum(?) that I regularly mistake for a sample of face cream from Aesop, like paintbrush cups and morning coffee.
It comes from Switzerland, the land where everyone speaks four languages and lives in Annecy. I’d say it was a lot of packaging, but opening one of these is dangerous, as the coffee immediately starts crawling its way out of its cage and into our universe to enact world domination. So packaging is warranted.
Regardless of its clear and obvious ridiculousness, coffee paste with a light amount of sugar added is kind of genius. For everything except their suggested purpose, which is “outdoor coffee”.
We all know the only real outdoor way to have coffee is a bripe:
And in a pinch, you can use a siphon.
Anyway, I say they sent me too much coffee because one of these tubes can make some 20 cups of coffee—more than enough to test. A very strange measurement, as it tells you to mix 5g of coffee paste with water to make a cup. I am not going to weigh this outdoors, so I just guesstimated. About two toothpaste-amounts seems sufficient [about 1/20th of the tube].
Aside: It is really easy to want to brush your teeth with this stuff, in a kind of intrusive thought kind of way.
However, why stop there?
This is coffee paste! The possibilities!
In an obvious move for everyone that everyone enjoyed, I bought a few pastries at a place in flushing (from Fay Da, which is famous but actually awful), and made them into coffee pastries.
I’m glad I didn’t look at the recipe before doing this, because I easily put more than 5g on each pastry. You can have your cake coffee and eat it, too 🤮.
It tastes pretty good! It’s kind of like the best-of-the-best homemade coffee in 2005. It’s not specialty, but the flavor is very archetypal coffee. It’s also dark roast, so you know, it seems like they’re planning to come out with other roast levels at some point if you need a lighter flavor.
Yes, I did make a cup of coffee with this. I think a good way to support this is to say you should buy it for people that are currently using folgers or Keurig, as this is somehow even less work but tastes a lot better.
If you want to take the time to make a pourover at home, or walk to a shop, it’s going to be better than the tube (of course), but this exists and it’s an option.
If you’re crazy, I highly recommend getting yourself vegemite/marmite and making a sandwich with one side vegemite and one side no normal coffee and let me know if it brings out the proper Aussie in ya.
Action shot.
Thanks for tuning in!
Enjoy your coffee! Spread it on everything! Eat your coffee from a tuuuuuuuuuube!