Brazilian coffee, and why it is filtered

Greece drinks its coffee two ways and is very sure about both. There is Greek coffee, made in a briki, and there is espresso in all its forms, which in summer means a freddo in almost every hand on almost every street. Filter coffee barely registers. It is the thing in the hotel breakfast room that nobody chooses.

So the first line of our coffee list is a small provocation. Brazilian filter coffee, above the Greek coffee and the espresso, on a menu in Athens. Here is why it is there and why it is worth the two minutes it takes to make.

What Brazil actually does with coffee

Brazil has been the largest coffee producer in the world since the middle of the nineteenth century, and it is not close. Roughly a third of the world's coffee comes from there, which means that whatever you drank this morning, some of it was probably Brazilian even if nothing on the packet said so.

The growing conditions push the crop in a particular direction. Much of it is processed dry, which is to say the cherry is left on the bean while it dries in the sun rather than being washed off first. That contact does something specific: it pushes the cup towards chocolate, nuts and body, and away from the sharp fruit acidity that a washed Ethiopian or Kenyan coffee is prized for.

This is why Brazilian coffee is the backbone of so many espresso blends and why it is so often described, a little unfairly, as the safe one. Low acid, heavy body, sweet. Those are not faults. They are what makes it the coffee you can drink a lot of, which is exactly how Brazil drinks it.

Coado, the method the country actually uses

The domestic Brazilian method is coado, poured through a cloth filter set in a wooden or wire ring over a jug. Hot water goes on slowly, gravity does the rest, and the cloth catches the grounds and most of the oils.

What comes out is clean and transparent in a way no espresso is. You can see through it. Because the water is in contact with the grounds for a couple of minutes rather than twenty five seconds, it extracts differently, and because nothing is under pressure there is no crema and no emulsified oil to carry weight on the tongue. The result tastes more of the coffee and less of the machine.

It is served as cafezinho, a small cup, usually sweetened, and it is offered constantly. In an office, in a shop, at somebody's house, the little cup arrives without being asked for. It is closer in social function to a Greek coffee than to an espresso, which is the part most visitors miss.

Three ways of not using a machine

It is worth putting the three side by side, because they are genuinely different drinks and most people have only ever compared two of them.

Greek coffee keeps everything. The grounds go into the briki with the water and stay in the cup, which is why the last centimetre is not for drinking. It is thick, and the texture is part of the point.

Coado removes everything. The cloth is finer than paper and takes out the grounds and much of the oil, leaving a clear cup with no sediment at all. Espresso is the third road entirely: pressure, nine bars of it, pushed through a tight puck in half a minute, which emulsifies the oils and produces something concentrated and heavy. Three methods, one bean, three drinks that have almost nothing in common.

What is on our list, and when

The Brazilian filter coffee sits at the top, and under it the list is frankly Athenian: Greek coffee and double Greek, espresso and double, americano, cappuccino, latte, and yes, Nescafe, because pretending otherwise would be a pose. On the cold side there is freddo espresso and freddo cappuccino, because this is Athens and refusing to serve a freddo would be an act of hostility.

The room opens at eight in the morning and the kitchen starts an hour later, so there is a window at the beginning of the day when coffee is genuinely all there is. That hour on the terrace, before the brunch service starts and before the square wakes up properly, is the best time to drink the filter coffee, because you have nothing else to do while it brews.

If you are eating, it also works at the other end. A coado after something off the grill does what an espresso cannot, which is to last longer than four seconds. Order it with something from the dessert end of the menu, or on its own in the afternoon, when the room is quiet and nobody will rush you out of the chair.