Greek Coffee
It’s easy to overlook the gifts of Greek coffee, especially if you’ve heard it described as “hot sludge” or “little cups of tar.” My partner introduced me to the coffee of his homeland with no expectation that I’d take up the challenge of learning to enjoy it, which of course freed me to do so.
Like many non-Greeks, I had no idea this coffee was less an acquired taste than an acquired process, one that extends through each phase of preparation and consumption, closing with the optional reading of your fortune from the pattern of grounds in an overturned cup (mine include a bas-relief of the Loch Ness Monster). Step by venerable step, a drink the size of a large thimble comes to dominate your activity for the better part of an hour. Or much longer for adult males in traditional settings—a coffee ritual that evolved over centuries does not transform quickly in response to shifts in gender roles or notions of productivity.
During my first decade of visits to Greece, I engaged in this ritual with dewy zeal. Not quite a tourist, not fully at home, I brought along my watercolor set, my journals, my light or heavy reading. I met with friends and dodged cigarette smoke, glad for the bright sky, the stone floor, the foraging cats. Another decade on, as my station shifted from inarticulate guest to family member and passable Greek-speaker, I learned to make more consistently tolerable coffee, and to accept the lengthy pause between serving and sipping. I’ve felt the scrutiny of veteran kafenío patrons, seated at a row of tiny tables along a shaded wall. I can navigate the freshly-hosed patio, slip into a plastic chair, and order my usual brew via facial cues. Slowly, repeatedly, I’ve revised my assessment of why anyone would bother.
First to fall were my fuzzy misconceptions that set Greek coffee behind its more expedient or embellished competitors. Greek coffee does not replace espresso. Greek coffee is not Turkish coffee, a point best left undebated—the blend of beans differs, the roast is lighter, and the granularity a bit finer. Cardamom plays no role, and neither does milk. Additional distinctions are largely political. The flavor comes close to what its aroma promises, somewhere between robust and what culinary critics might call chocolatey notes.
Preparing Greek coffee requires minimal equipment, and comfort with learning curves, as the method is less forgiving than making an espresso or frappé. Outside of Greece, you can buy what you need online and in specialty shops. The powder-like grind is mixed and brewed in a roughly pear-shaped, pear-sized, long-handled metal vessel of Ottoman descent, called a bríki. The bríki is typically heated on a gazáki: a stand-alone gas burner, like a small camp stove. Other options include the electric bríki (wicked fast, if imperfect), electric stove (purgatory), or pre-industrial hot sand tray (upscale-retro). Patience, practice, and exquisite timing will allow you to watch over the rumbling bríki, intervene decisively, and remove it from the heat source in the exceedingly brief interval between perfection and ruination. The coffee is then poured into a thick-walled demitasse called a flijáni, with great care taken to preserve the foam and distribute it evenly. For detailed instructions, I recommend comparing several tutorials; disagreements abound, even in this well-established terrain. Be ready to compost your disasters and drink your slightly imperfect renderings alone. Do not offer or speak of them.
As in most households throughout Greece, at any given time we have at least one working gazáki, and a few battle-scarred bríkia. I can’t think of these without hearing a metal spoon swirling against the inside of a bríki, followed by the satisfying whoosh-thump of the gazáki lighting, and the palpable calm of whoever is in the kitchen, peering over the bríki, tending a nascent brew.
Whether you make or buy Greek coffee, you must commit to the amount of sugar up front. The laws of physics preclude mixing in additions once this particular method is underway. That’s why servers expect you to state how sweet you’d like your coffee when ordering, preferably in the same breath with which you utter the word for coffee (kafé) using, if the gods see fit, correct declensions. Sweetness is categorized as either glykó (quite sweet, think “glucose”), métrio (medium), or skéto (plain/black). The lexically adventurous may specify borderline states, such as glykó bros métrio (sweet towards medium). I started out in sensible métrio territory, but have slowly worked my way into full skéto. Whatever the sugar level, Greek coffee casts a smoky-sweet air that’s hard to resist, but resist you must. This drink is not for the impetuous or the kinetic.
Consuming Greek coffee begins by allowing it to sit long enough for the grounds to settle. How long? you might reasonably ask, expecting standard units of human-scale time. You could observe a more experienced drinker. Nothing marks a newcomer as readily as a first sip taken the moment a flijáni is placed in front of them. Those unhappy attempts to drink prematurely are the primary source of Greek coffee’s unwarranted bad rap (mouthful of hot sludge). You can safely, discreetly attempt half a sip after the coffee has sat anywhere from five to ten minutes, or the approximate leisurely reading time of a 1,000-word essay. Then choose your grit factor, and either keep sipping, or wait for the grounds to settle further.
Sit, sip, and savor. In classic (colloquially speaking) fashion, some Greeks will nurse a small coffee for most of an afternoon, allowing ample time to study passers-by or take in the uncountable, unnamed moments of light and faces and movement, of birdsong and breezes and traffic noise. Whether in Greece or elsewhere, a coffee that insists on stillness can open a space for sitting, for listening, for the way intention dissolves in attentiveness. And although I persist in bringing a book or journal to my coffee, the process usually overtakes my purposes and leaves me doing nothing, more beautifully than I could hope to do on my own.
