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War or no war, Ukrainians won’t give up their coffee
Economy

War or no war, Ukrainians won’t give up their coffee

When Russian tanks first entered Ukraine more than two years ago, Artem Vradii was sure his business would be affected.

“Who would think of coffee in this situation?” thought Mr. Vradii, co-founder of a coffee roastery in kyiv called Mad Heads. “No one would care.”

But in the days following the start of the invasion, he began receiving messages from Ukrainian soldiers. One asked for bags of ground coffee because he couldn’t stand the energy drinks the army supplied him. Another simply asked for beans: he had brought his own grinder to the front.

“I was really shocked,” Vradii said in a recent interview in his roastery, a 40-foot-tall brick building buzzing with the sound of ground coffee and filled with the smell of freshly ground beans. “Despite the war, people still thought about coffee. They could abandon their homes, their habits. But they couldn’t live without coffee.”

The soldiers’ requests are just one facet of a little-known cornerstone of today’s Ukrainian lifestyle: its vibrant coffee culture.

Over the past decade, coffee shops have proliferated across Ukraine, in cities large and small. This is particularly true in kyiv, the capital, where small coffee kiosks staffed by trained baristas serving tasty mochas for less than two dollars have become a fixture of the urban landscape.

If you enter one of kyiv’s hidden courtyards, there’s a good chance you’ll find a coffee shop with baristas busy perfecting their latte art behind the counter.

Coffee culture has flourished globally, including in tea-obsessed Britain, but in Ukraine, over the past two years, it has taken on special meaning as a sign of resilience and defiance.

“Everything will be fine,” said Maria Yevstafieva, an 18-year-old barista who was making a latte one recent morning in a Kiev cafe that had just been damaged by a missile attack. The shop window had been smashed by the explosion and had fallen onto the counter, but Ms. Yevstafieva was unfazed.

“How can they break us?” she is heard saying in a video, referring to the Russian army. “We have a strike, we make coffee.”

Before the war, Ukraine was one of the fastest-growing coffee markets in Europe, according to research group Allegra World Coffee Portal. In kyiv, the number of cafes continued to grow even after the Russian invasion, reaching some 2,500 stores today, according to Pro-Consulting, a Ukrainian market research group.

In the capital, for example, it is difficult to miss the Girkiy chain, with more than 70 cafes. Its mint-colored kiosks are found at the foot of centuries-old Orthodox churches and around kyiv’s main squares.

On a recent afternoon, Yelyzaveta Holota, an 18-year-old barista, was busy at her kiosk preparing orders. She had only been on the job for four months, but she already had a touch of confidence: she weighed the ground coffee, put it in a portafilter and, after pouring an espresso into a cup, gave it a little swirl to bring out the flavors. .

The technique has to be perfect, he said, because the competition is fierce. Six other cafes line the street where he works in central kyiv, including a second from Girkiy, which means “bitter” in Ukrainian.

Founded in 2015, the chain often served low-quality coffee and focused on speed. But in 2020, Oleh Astashev, the founder, visited the Barn in Berlin, an artisanal coffee institution that roasts its own coffee.

The visit impressed and inspired him. Back in kyiv, he built his own roastery, bought high-end Italian coffee machines and began training his baristas.

“We changed everything: the name, the service, the products, the quality of the coffee beans, the quality of the water,” he said. “Anyone should be able to drink high-quality coffee.”

The chain’s previous name was “Gorkiy,” or bitter in Russian.

Astashev’s story reflects how the country’s coffee boom is linked to its broader rapprochement with Europe.

After the Ukrainian revolution on Maidan Square in 2014, which overthrew a pro-Russian president, the country strengthened its ties with Europe, including through visa-free entry for its citizens. Many Ukrainians traveled west and discovered a coffee culture that had not yet crossed their borders. Very soon they would bring him back home.

“We wanted our coffee shops in kyiv to be like those in Europe,” said Maryna Dobzovolska, 39, who co-founded Right Coffee Bar with her husband, Oleksii Gurtov, in 2017.

If you ask Ukrainian coffee entrepreneurs about Vienna’s famous coffee shops or Italian espresso, they will dismiss them as a “conservative” and “old-fashioned” view of coffee culture.

Their model was cities like Berlin and Stockholm, where the so-called third wave of coffee shops has multiplied in the last two decades, emphasizing high-quality beans and innovative recipes.

More recently, Dobzovolska and Gurtov have been experimenting with anaerobic coffee, a processing method that involves fermenting coffee in sealed tanks without oxygen, giving the drink fruity flavors.

“Try it. You’ll love it,” said Gurtov, 49, as he poured the steaming purple drink.

Always willing to push the boundaries, Ukrainian baristas have also popularized the “Capuorange,” a double shot of espresso mixed with fresh orange juice, which is now on sale everywhere in kyiv.

Several foreigners said they were amazed by the quality of the coffee in a country that, since the Soviet era, consumed mainly instant coffee.

“This is the best coffee in the world,” said Michael McLaughlin, a 51-year-old American volunteering in Ukraine, as he ordered an Americano in Maidan Square on a recent afternoon.

Some say it is simply a return to Ukraine’s roots.

Legend has it that the man who opened the first café in Vienna at the end of the 17th century was Jerzy Kulczycki, a soldier born in present-day Ukraine. He is honored with a life-size statue in Lviv that praises him as the war hero “who taught Europe to drink coffee.”

Volodymyr Efremov, a coffee roaster at Idealist, a major Ukrainian coffee brand, said his goal now was to “popularize” specialty coffee throughout the country.

In today’s Ukraine, there is perhaps no better way to achieve that goal than with the military. Every month, Idealist and other coffee producers deliver tens of thousands of bags of filter coffee to the military: individual bags filled with ground coffee. These are some of the best products on the Ukrainian coffee market.

On social media, soldiers have posted videos of themselves pouring hot water into coffee bags placed over iron mugs before savoring the steaming beverage in a log ditch.

Standing near an artillery position last year, a Ukrainian junior sergeant, Maksim, who did not give his last name per military rules, was boiling water in a small white kettle, a bag of Mad Heads ground coffee next to him. His unit had just fired an Australian-made howitzer at Russian targets on the southern front and he was looking forward to a nice cup of coffee.

For five straight minutes he talked about the degree of water mineralization needed to achieve the perfect drink, the quality of the single-origin beans that make it “taste like coffee with honey, alcohol and banana,” and how the drink should be drunk to ” perceive more”. flavors.”

Maksim, whose call sign is Stayer, said his fellow soldiers had found Mad Heads coffee “delicious and asked where he got it from.”

“I said, ‘Guys, it’s the 21st century. Let’s eat properly, even if we are in the army.’”

Michael Schwirtz contributed reports.