THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
"I feel like we're back in America," my son says, as we both down Löfbergs Coffee's latest concoction of sweet goodness in their area of this year's London Coffee Festival. Their representative seemed to bristle slightly when I said it was a crowd pleaser, but I honestly meant it as a compliment. It is both innovative and a little bit of Valhalla in a matcha.
I could see what my 18 year old meant. We have spent whole summers drinking iced lattes stateside within wave-roaring distances of the beaches of Point Pleasant that were half cinnamony sweeteners and half coffee. An American Starbucks will dump caramel syrup into your macchiato without a hint of a request for anything except the bitterest and strongest of javas. But this is the London Coffee Festival (LCF) and what Löfbergs are doing is both tastier and more subtle than anything I have seen back home.
And for the average expat javaphile living here in Blighty, this event is like Christmas in springtime, in more ways than one. Held in the Truman Brewery space, almost smack dab in the middle of trendy Brick Lane in London's East End, the LCF rivals the yuletide season for pure, contagious, festive joy! There is a caffeine-fueled happiness; percussively infectious thumping of music permeating three floors of display space, demonstrations, competitions, and a countless array of companies, charities and cafes handing out coffees and tasty treats as liberally as sweets thrown into the crowd of a Christmas pantomime!
So if you like the black stuff (no, not Guinness!) this is the event of the year in the Metropolis for you, and if you are willing to shed £38 on the ticket price, you will get back the value and more in conversations with denizens of the industry that keeps millions of offices up, awake and alert the world over, as well as free biscuits, free promotional protein bars, free cocktails, and free bags of coffee won in games of chance – of which there were more this year than in all the time I have been covering the festival signifying that my beloved coffee culture is just as steeped in the gamification of society as any other industry. And all to the good, tossing a hoop, spinning a wheel or scanning the right barcode to a random reader on the wall hoping you've picked the right number like the lucky combo at a craps table in Vegas is no harm.
There is something of the atmosphere of the popup amusement park, with access to amounts of espresso that could make your vision as jittery as a Ridley Scott film. Taken over by hospitality, data and events company William Reed in 2023, the LCF follows, is a barometer of, and influences trends in global coffee, with one of the major trends this year being iced matcha drinks of all colors and flavors.
"We actually haven't had a coffee yet," my son said to me as we finished our second refreshing cup of the green stuff and moved on to the aforementioned Löfbergs area. And he was right. Coffee was plentiful, iced drinks being favored, as indicated by the cover story on the most recent issue of 5th Wave magazine ('The New Ice Age, Why iced beverages are the next frontier...'), but the clear impression was that just as available was the refreshing and often sweetened because of the surprisingly endearing bitter taste of the Japanese derived matcha drink.
Our first coffee ended up being made by a barista employed by high end coffee hardware specialists La Cimbali, but the roaster was London-based Kiss The Hippo, which I had to ask the barista to repeat several times. Branding genius though the name was, the coffee was simply delectable.
It was not all party vibes only though. There were serious stories to tell at this year's festival as well, and uniquely innovative and socially engaged organizations telling them. Farm Africa had set up stall and you had the opportunity to donate to the vital work they are doing on the ground in countries like Kenya and Uganda for farmers, poor communities, and particularly for marginalized groups, working to use corporate sponsorships to power the community building they do, whilst helping to ensure fairer conditions for coffee producers and workers.
Undoubtedly the most fun and most illuminating moment of the festival for me was the groundbreaking organization SEND Coffee, a non-profit whose mission is to work with young people with special needs to empower them to confidently take up roles within the hospitality sector. They had a chalk sandwich board advertising 'learn how to order your coffee in BSL' and indeed, Polly, their operations manager taught me how to sign 'oat flat white' and my son, 'cappuccino'. SEND is a testament to that interesting blend of edgy, fun, and inclusive, that shows the future of coffee and hospitality here in the UK has the potential to expand in a multiplicity of fascinating and encouraging directions.
The coolest vibes as well as the official award for the best designed cafe went to London-based Fuckoffee. You read that right. And I am pretty sure we can still print it. [Just – ed] With a cardboard satirical send-up of a certain overly tanned president funding-billionaire highlighting said mogul's far right curious tendencies, and a warm, welcoming and chill vibe, if this uber-punk outfit had not been stationed on one side of a crowded bottleneck in the festival I easily could have stayed chatting and chilling for ages.
But isn't that also the London Coffee Festival all over? Constant movement and momentum, like speed dating a cross section of global coffee culture. As Americans, a people that pride themselves on being a nation preferring Arabica beans roasted and squeezed into a cup to jolt us into alertness until the next iced latte at lunch as opposed to a tissuey thin bag of oolong leaves steeped in boiled water, British coffee culture, especially in this cosmopolitan center of richness and flavor is fresh, exciting and frankly, hard to beat.
But it only happens once a year, so if you missed it, follow William Reed, Allegra and The London Coffee Festival for other events and for tickets for next year. Mind the caffeine crash on the way home though! It's a doozy!
