I’ve eaten at probably every Ethiopian restaurant in town but I have yet to go to a coffee ceremony, so as soon as we started the Coffee feature I called up Fassil, my favourite Ethiopian restaurant in the city. Coffee is said to have originated in Ethiopia and they have a long history of cultivating coffee plants and brewing coffee. Here’s the story, according to World Hum:
Local legend has it that coffee was discovered by a goatherder from Abyssinia (modern day Ethiopia) called Kaldi. One day Kaldi noticed that his normally docile goats were strangely lively. He investigated and found they had been nibbling the bright red berries of a nearby bush. Kaldi tasted a few berries and felt invigorated. Convinced of a miracle, he ran to the local monastery to share his discovery. But the Abbot wasn’t so impressed. He thought the berries were the Devil’s work and flung them onto the fire.
Naturally, they figured out the coffee brewing bit from there and it’s been an important part of Ethiopian culture ever since. Rather than an exercise in getting caffeine into the blood stream as quickly as possible (as it has become in North America and Europe), it’s a lengthy event that signifies deep friendship, hospitality and respect. In Ethiopia it may be performed as many as three times a day but in Vancouver at least, it’s more casual.
The ceremony is usually performed by a young woman wearing the traditional white cotton dress. She starts by lighting a stick of incense and then passes around some small offering of food as a snack. At Fassil we had just finished lunch (always enormous because we love it so much), so we just picked at our remaining injera instead.
Slowly the aromas of roasting coffee started to mingle with the incense. The Ethiopian coffee ceremony starts with green beans that are roasted in front of you in a shallow brazier so that it becomes a sensory experience – hearing the rustling of the beans against the pan as they brown, smelling the beautiful aromatic oils coming from the coffee as it roasts, and in our case watching the server bring the pan out of the kitchen where it was roasting and slowly walk it around the room for us.
She grinds it (traditionally with a mortar and pestle, but I think not in our case) and transfers the grinds to the coffee pot for brewing. The coffee maker is a clay pot called a jebena’ (J-be-na) that combines grinds and water and is placed right into the fire until it boils. The shape and style of the jebena is very unique – a squat flat basin with a long neck – but it’s well designed. Our host explains that clay is traditional but even in modern times it’s necessary as a metal vessel would leave a metallic taste and the strange shape indicates a low boiling point that will bring the maximum amount of flavour to the coffee as the temperature slowly rises.
Again, this is where our experience differs from the traditional one: the grinds are brewed three times, being transferred (and hence heated and cooled each time) from the jebena to a decanter. This must have happened in our ceremony, but in the kitchen – we didn’t see it.
To serve, the coffee is strained and then poured continuously from arm height into small white cups not unlike modern espresso cups. Unsurprisingly, coffee splashing on saucers is expected even from experienced hosts. We were quite impressed with the flavour. It was very nutty and rich while being one-dimensional – which we would expect from a single-origin bean. And from our brewing tests at home, we know that the bitter tail is caused from being boiled and then removed from the heat.
Fassil serves their coffee every Sunday at lunchtime. They say you don’t need to make a reservation but they were surprised we wanted to have some coffee even after I had made a reservation. In the end their may be a more traditional or more complete ceremony elsewhere in town, but I love Fassil. The food is excellent (see Curried goat for a review) and the welcome is always warm.
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