Japan: a small island country that manages to be one of the most powerful countries in the world.
This country is famous for many things — art, animation, video games.
But did you know that Japan has also helped shape today’s coffee culture?
That’s right. While you may picture Japan as a tea-loving culture —and they are—, they love coffee just as much, and have been enjoying it for centuries.
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So let’s look at the many ways that Japan, and Japanese culture in particular, have influenced the world of coffee.
#1 Cold brew
This is quite surprising, mainly because cold brew usually strikes us as a very modern beverage.
But the truth is that this beverage has existed since around the 1700s, and it was discovered in Japan. Kyoto, to be more specific, which was the Japanese capital until the 19th century.
The few stories about the invention of cold brew agree on one thing: it was completely accidental.
Someone left beans soaking in water, forgot about it, and came back a day later to find delicious brewed coffee.
From there, people started making their own cold brew, inventing even cold drip.
This invention would reach the world only through the Dutch, the only country which was allowed on the island for a very long time.
Nowadays, it is clear that the drink was invented in Japan.
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#2 Canned coffee
Coffee was not always super popular in Japan.
In fact, the first coffee shop to ever open, back in the 1880s, went bankrupt in just a few short years.
It goes to show that coffee, a relatively new beverage, had a long way to go to rival tea, which had been the hot beverage of choice for thousands of years.
In the 20th century, however, the story changed.
People were starting to drink more and more coffee and because of their new, busy, 20th-century lifestyles, they needed a more convenient way to have their coffee.
So canned coffee was invented.
It consisted of either black coffee or coffee with milk in small 250ml cans which would become a product in Japan’s numerous and oddly specific vending machines.
While canned coffee was invented in Japan in the 1950s and became an instant hit, it wasn’t implemented anywhere else in the world for decades.
#3 The Hario V60
Although it is probably a general notion that coffee and pour over coffee in particular is an European invention, the Hario V60, arguably the king of pour overs, was invented in Japan.
Up until this point there weren’t any real pour over brewing methods. There were similar ways of brewing coffee using a cloth filter but nothing quite like the Hario V60 which provided a piece of hardware to place the filter and grounds that would help water flow and heat retention.
Hario, the company, was founded in the 1920s and they weren’t all about coffee at first.
Instead, they dedicated themselves to making all sorts of glass products until they came up with the design for the Hario V60 which would be made of insulated glass and would be ideal for brewing coffee.
Ironically enough, the actual product ended up not being made out of glass, but ceramic.
Nowadays you can also find plastic and metal versions of it.
Although a simple little device, the V60 would go on to revolutionize the market.
Only about a decade later would something similar see the light of day— it was the Chemex, which was invented in the 1930s in Germany.
#4 Matcha latte
The absolute peak of culture fusion.
Matcha latte is the perfect combination of coffee and tea.
To fully understand just how Japanese Matcha is, we need to take a closer look.
Matcha is the green tea equivalent of specialty coffee. It is grown only in the shade, boosting flavor and aroma. The leaves are then ground and made into a fine powder, which is what is called Matcha.
This Matcha is used in the Japanese tea ceremony.
This ceremony focuses around the preparation and degustation of green tea and is incredibly choreographed.
It lasts hours and must be done by an expert.
It wasn’t until recently that Japan thought of combining matcha with coffee, and the results are absolutely delicious.
All over the world, coffee lovers are falling in love with this ingredient not just for lattes but for all other sorts of coffee beverages.
What once used to be a very Japanese ingredient can now be ordered in most modern coffee shops.
#5 The Japanese love specialty coffees
Did you know that Japan is also one of the countries that buys the most specialty coffee in the whole world?
They are obsessed with Jamaican coffee in particular. As an interesting fact, Japan purchases over 80% of Jamaican Blue Mountain Coffee every year.
And those are just some of the ways that Japan has influenced coffee culture worldwide.
Japan is today one of the world’s most avid coffee consumers, and Japanese baristas often make it to the finals of worldwide coffee competitions.
Photos by Rudy and Peter and Charlotte May
