The Coffee Buff
Sampling some liquid gold from Panama
Jose Vales is a man on a mission: to change the way Argentines drink coffee.
When you see the sign,"Coffee is a religion", written on one of the blackboards around his San Telmo Coffeetown kiosk you're under no illusion this is a man serious about the black gold. And in a city like Buenos Aires where coffee and cafe culture take up a fair amount of many peoples' day, Jose is right. But that doesn't mean the coffee they're drinking is any good.
As a coffee lover myself I've scoured the city to find the very few and far between places serving up a delicious espresso and truly you can count them on your fingers. Generally speaking an Argentine likes a scalding hot cup of coffee with plenty of milk and sugar that will last a good hour. The antithesis of the brew Jose serves up at Coffetown.
As a reporter in the coffee-producing hotspots of Latin America, Jose spent many an hour writing in cafes, brewing up coffee for his journalist friends and when he returned to Buenos Aires he realised something had to be done to change the city's coffee culture. And he was the man to get the coffee revolution rolling.
I interviewed him for Monocle's The Voyager - when I put together an audio guide to the inspiring places, people and businesses shaping up Buenos Aires today….his advice about starting a business in a country in a challenging economic predicament is pretty sage as well and worth listening to!
At Coffeetown I sampled a brew from Panama and one from Yemen. Both so entirely different, with their individual aromas, depth, notes of cereals, fruits - it was like being introduced to different wines, sipping and savouring them and then going back to re-try them when they were cooler and discovering different aspects yet again. Mindblowing.
Jose and his wife, Analia run Buenos Aires first and only coffee school to train up and educate the next generation of baristas and coffee lovers. "We set out on this mission at a pretty slow pace but little by little Argentines are changing how they drink coffee. They like what we're doing and that makes us very happy", he says.
Allelujia to that!
VA in Buenos Aires
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