The Cupbearer Coffee Blends Tradition With Technology in Coffee

The Cupbearer Coffee
2/F 97 Don A. Roces Avenue, Quezon City
Instagram: www.instagram.com/thecupbearercoffeemnl/ 
Open from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., Tuesday to Sunday

(SPOT.ph) Shamgar Braza attributes his love of coffee to his family. “My father had a small farm in Sultan Kudarat, where they have the most production of coffee [in the country]. He introduced me to coffee, and I also discovered specialty coffee, which is very interesting to me because it’s so strict.” 

Braza is an airline pilot by profession, and it is in his travels that he found the hook for his recently opened coffee shop, The Cupbearer Coffee. “I used to fly to Dubai and Australia networks,” he says. And in Sydney, he encountered what's called the Freepour System—essentially a dispensing system designed to make it simple to brew batches of good coffee.

Also read: 10 Must-Try Cafes in BGC

The Cupbearer Coffee is a new coffee shop in Quezon City marrying tradition and technology

So, on the counter of The Cupbearer Coffee, there are these two taps adorned with LCD screens. The screens have information about the beans used in the brew, including the origin, the elevation at which the beans were grown, as well as flavor notes. On our visit, the beans available were from Kenya and Tanzania. A customer pays at the counter and is then handed a mug. They place the mug under the tap, and it will automatically pour a preprogrammed portion of black coffee.

“At first I was really skeptical about it,” Braza admits, “They’re using single-origin special coffee beans in making a batch brew. I was thinking, would it offend the coffee enthusiasts, the roasters, making single-origin coffees in a batch brew? But it worked.”

Third-wave coffee shops have built their reputations on serving specialty beans via pour-over, and while this has generally improved the level of coffee one can get, the method comes with a lot of variables. “V60 (one of the most popular pour over cones, made by Japanese brand Hario)  is really good, especially with the specialty coffee and the single origins,” says Braza. “But on the business side, it’s very slow, and inconsistent.”

This is where the Freepour comes in. Instead of brewing coffee one pour over at a time, The Cupbearer Coffee makes batches of three or four liters at a time. “We use a precision brewer, the Fetco. We can program the Fetco and dial in our brew just like the V60. It has [controls for] brew ratio, temperature, and also pre-brewing. It doesn’t take away the respect from the beans, farmers, and the roasters.”

The system promises consistency. Coffee is volatile, and the human element can make for strikingly different cups. An extra second of pouring might result in certain flavors being muted, or others amplified. When a coffee shop gets busy, baristas might have to juggle doing hand pours and taking orders from customers. What this means for the consumer is that even if they have a go-to bean that they like to have brewed, each cup they order might taste different from the last one they had.

The first cup from the Freepour is P200. Refills are priced at P150—it's the shop's way to encourage having more than one mugful, which we'll gladly partake in. And the result of all this technology is a beautiful, complex cup of coffee. Braza wants to have a rotation of single-origin beans for his system, but the ones available as of this writing are both delicately fruity African varietals. The Kenya coffee beans have this upfront caramel-like sweetness that eventually gives way to a burst of bright citrus, while the beans from Tanzania are just remarkable, offering up notes of bright red berries, white flowers, and this backend tropical note that recalls langka.

Apart from the Freepour brews, the shop offers your standard set of espresso drinks. But Braza does things a little differently as well.

“I’m a traditionalist,” he says. “I also want to introduce the traditional coffee lineup: the cappuccino, the flat white, and the cortado in their original sizes.” What this means is that none of these drinks exceeds six fluid ounces.

He’ll start introducing this when customers raise an eyebrow at the size of their cappuccino, especially compared to the milk-heavy, ice-filled, five-sized versions you’d find at big-name coffee chains. "Here [at The Cupbearer Coffee], we don’t have iced versions [of those three drinks].”

On the food side, the coffee shop offers a small assortment of pastries. Braza says that he picked their supplier specifically for how they did their almond croissant, which is actually less flaky than one might expect. He says the denser pastry reminds him of how they do it back in Australia.

The Cupbearer Coffee offers Wi-Fi, and there are plenty of sockets available. It really seems to be positioning itself as a place where you can work. There’s even a full conference room that one can rent out. “I’ve seen other coffee shops,” Braza says. “People have meetings there. But the noise isn’t tolerable. And the privacy just isn’t there.” So he presents this conference room as a solution for small groups looking to do serious business. The room is equipped with a conference table, seating for around ten people, and a screen for presentations.

And of course, if you do have a meeting there, you can be guaranteed, at the very least, that there will be good coffee to fuel the work. That’s the focus of The Cupbearer Coffee when it comes down to it, all of its efforts put towards trying to give people the best cup of coffee that they can.

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