COFFEE CULTURE

Gün yetmedi taştıkça taşan neşvemize

 imrendi o gün kahvede kim varsa bize

‘Dostlarla’ dedim, ‘sohbetimiz bal gibidir

ey kahveci gel katma şeker kahvemize! ’

(The day fell short of our overflowing glee

Everyone at the coffeehouse was green with envy

 “With friends,” I said, “our  causerie is sweet as honey  

Oh coffeemaker, do not add sugar to our coffee!)

Beşir Ayvazoğlu

(“Sade Kahve”, Kayıp Şiir, p. 33)

These are the opening lines of a book titled Egyptian Coffee Culture: sharing a good cup of coffee with friends will shorten the day, elongate the joy, and bring more meaning to life. To have a high quality cup coffee, we need not only high quality beans but also from the way it was brewed, from the service, the environment surrounding us and our companions.

Here at Trung Nguyen, we see the world of coffee through three coffee cultures: Ottoman coffee culture, Roman coffee culture and Zen coffee culture. If Zen coffee culture is a perfect blend of a spiritual life, philosophy, and the combination of Sky-Earth-Men, Roman coffee culture is a part of capitalism and of the rising of machinery - a "product" of modern Western civilization. A mixture of the East and the West is Ottoman coffee culture - a culture that see coffee as a beverage of the spiritual life, which is the origin of coffee.