Food Detective - Kopi, Kopi, Kopi!

In May 2005, I asked readers to send shed light on this mystery:

"I have often wondered about coffee drinking in Singapore before the onslaught of Starbucks and the like.  I enjoy my Cafe Latte and Cappucino, but I love the strong dark brew of Singapore-style coffee in coffee shops and hawker centres too!  I wonder how the local brew we enjoy had come about, after all coffee drinking is a fairly "foreign" beverage to immigrants from India, China and the Malay Archipelago in the 19th century and early 20th century.  Is this brew similar to the version drank by the British and the Dutch in the region in that era? "

Here are some clues from culinary enthusiasts :

Panadda Harrington wrote,

"BTW- we have similar kopi-  called O-liang. There is a shop in Chinatown in Bangkok that serves just O-liang for many generations. I think we have the cloth-strainer for it here somewhere in the house too."

"O-liang is Chinese word, and thus a Chinese coffee drink cold. It is made from a hot coffee made by dipping ground coffee contained in a cloth strainer in hot water. If you drink the coffee hot, you add sweet, condensed milk. We call this "kopi". If you drink the coffee cold, you add the plain hot coffee with sugar (lots of sugar) and pour over crushed ice."

"that serves Vietnamese dripping hot coffee, served with or without sweet, condensed milk. It tastes similar, just different technology. I believe it derives from Chinese food culture too. Same as in Cambodia and Laos."
 

Tony Tan of Betel Box Hostel in Singapore wrote,

"Between my hostel http://www.betelbox.com/ and Guan Hoe Soon Peranakan Restaurant http://www.guanhoesoon.com/ there is a distributor which I
can't remember the name. They grind the beans in the shop. Their beans are roasted somewhere else in Singapore and sent to the shop. There
are 2 kinds of beans available, white roast and dark roast.Ironically, dark roast is less potent (caffiene) than white roast but
dark roast is definitely more aromatic than white roast. At this shop,you can buy either roasts or a mix and their mix is pretty decent;
they do distribute to alot of the coffee shops around singapore.

I remember sometime ago, channel 8 did this coffee documentary which outline how coffee gets to the coffee shops. I remembered that the
skill of the coffee chef is very important as this person used to be in charge of buying the beans, pick, roast and grind it. Depending on
the quality of the beans, there will be different methods of roasting and then brewing it to bring out the best flavours. Guess it has
changed somewhat now since roasting is somewhat centralised at the factories and that quality of the beans from different parts of the
world is becoming similar. There is another coffee trader on Joo Chiat Place near Kim Choo Kueh Chang but I never bought from them before.
They seem to have many blends in various tins which has a glass window so that you can see the colour and grain size difference."

"Sometime ago, a guest bought me some Hainanese coffee and I have to say that I found it sharper than the coffee I'm used to in Malaysia
and Singapore. Indonesians have a different way of serving coffee which they grind the beans to a powder and boiled it. The sediments
settle and its then ready to drink. Similar to the way Lebanese drink their coffee too but their grounds are slightly thicker."
 

Doing some digging on my own, here's what I found from Selina Ching Chan's article, "Consuming Food : Structuring  Social Life and Creating Social Relationships" in Chan Kwok Bun & Ton Chee Kiong (eds), Past Times : A Social History of Singapore, Singapore : Times Editions, 2003.

"Coffee shops were mainly owned by the Hainanese.  This was related to the fact that the Hainanese worked for the British during the colonial era and had learnt the techniques of making coffee.  The habit of drinking coffee was certainly learnt from the colonial masters and this makes the coffeeshop an imitation of the cafe.  The coffeeshop, however, is very different from a Western-style cafe.

The way in which the coffee is prepared, served and consumed is unique.  Coffee beans here were fried with butter.  This was different from the practice in Western Europe or the States, where beans are roasted.  A piece of butter was usually served with the coffee.  People either added the butter to the coffee or ate it separately.  It was believed that this method of drinking coffee would soothe the throat.  The locals believed that coffee was a "heaty" drink and butter a cooling food; taken together, they would maintain the balance in the body.  The coffee served here was mixed with condensed milk and sugar."

www.singaporefoodhistory.com / Copyright 2005 by Ai Ling Sim-Devadas