History of the coffee

Today, with the "specialties", the rare blends and the coffees of award-winning baristas, it may not be the best coffee you can find in Athens, but the "Greek" coffee is, more than any other, connected with the tradition of the Greeks, their everyday life and their temperament, identified with their joys and sorrows.

Greek coffee is a ritual, a welcome to the mousafiris, a companion in loneliness, a reason to gather together, a consolation - it is the only coffee served at funerals and memorial services.

The best proof that it is the most cult coffee and timelessly popular is that there is not a Greek who does not have a Greek coffee brewer and cups in his house, porcelain, with thick walls, to keep the drink hot for longer.

Gathering at homes for coffee and gossip was a female habit that continues unchanged to this day, usually alternating between neighborhood homes, twice a day, before lunch cooking begins and in the late afternoon. In the past, women used to drink coffee at home and men in the cafes, a place of social life and political and sports discussions, similar to the ancient church of the municipality. In today's times, when the traditional neighbourhood cafés have begun to disappear and coffee has become a gourmet affair, with highly specialised cafés and customers with high taste requirements, coffee is a habit for all genders and all ages. What has never changed is the way it is drunk: Greek coffee needs time and relaxation, it is drunk slowly, it needs conversation and company.

According to UNESCO, Turkish coffee is an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Turkey and its history in Greece began during the Turkish occupation.In fact, "Greek" coffee is not really Greek, it is Turkish, and that is how it was known until the persecution of Greeks by Istanbul in the early 1960s. Then people, out of reaction, started calling it "Greek".

According to UNESCO, Turkish coffee is an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Turkey and its history in Greece dates back to the years of Turkish rule.

The first people to experience the coffee that the Turks brought with them were the Greeks of Constantinople, Thessaloniki and Northern Greece in general. In fact, in 17th century Thessaloniki there were more than three hundred cafés where both nationalities met. In Athens, the first cafés appeared later, at first mainly with Turkish patrons. Over time, however, their clientele was enriched with Greeks and, according to Papadiamantis, the great Greek writer, from 1760 the coffee habit spread to the rest of Greece.

Coffee, as we drink it in the brew, without being filtered, is a habit that started with the Arabs. The first to brew this type of coffee were the Bedouins of the Middle East, who put the coffee pot on the sand that covered the coals to keep them lit.Is coffee the new wine? The popular beverage goes to another level

Until the beginning of the 20th century, coffee shops also did the job of the coffee maker, that is, they procured raw coffee and, after roasting it, ground it in small manual grinders.

The first specialised coffee shops, the coffee mills, which were quickly renamed coffee shops, appeared at the beginning of the 20th century and were dedicated exclusively to the import, processing and sale of coffee. Among the first coffee shops in Athens were the Belka House in Municipal Theatre Square (today's Kotzias Square) and the Andreas Rizopoulos Coffee Shop in the same area. In 1914, the Misegiannis-Mastoris coffee shop opened on Skoufa Street in Kolonaki, while in 1920 the first Loumidis coffee shop opened in Piraeus. Loumidis' shops still exist today.In Greek coffee, Brazilian coffee predominates, two varieties from Rio and Santos, which are blended. Ethiopian coffee is added to this blend and thus we have the final blend. The characteristics of Greek coffee come from the variety of beans and the way they are roasted, this makes a difference in taste. Greek coffee has a specific blend and a specific roast, which makes it blonde. It is also finely ground. These are the three key elements of its identity. Greeks make coffee that is blonder than Turks or Arabs, without flavouring (Arabs use mostly cardamom), more concentrated and they drink it in a larger quantity per cup.