As you know, I go to coffee houses to write and to read, and have for years. I took up this habit, before I drank coffee and before there were coffee houses.
This may sound weird to you, as peeling back the surface of the ordinary and showing its change over time always is. But it is also true. Coffee houses have a history and they are relatively new.
In English we have two words that show the difference, coffee shop and coffee house and how the first used to enclose the second.
A coffee shop is a kind of diner or cafe that served well watered drip coffee, what the Brazilians call café-té, that is a tincture of coffee. In contrast a coffee house focuses on coffee in the modern style, with a good expresso machine, like the classic Italian ones, and with baristas trained in pulling espressos and on that basis making every other coffee drink.
Two different worlds, two different techniques of getting coffee from toasted beans, and two different cultures of coffee.
When I first started to come to Alicante in December of 2022 over Christmas, I only found Café Arte, which had a branch near where I was living and one downtown in FNAC’s building. I quickly made the one near my place, staffed with Ecuadorians born in Spain, as my place to sit, read, and write. In the summer of 2023, I continued that custom.
When I returned, now to stay, in the summer of 2024, there were more places that served coffee with Italian names, an espresso machine, and an American-Australian style of thinking about coffee, far beyond and better quality than the Starbucks in the big Corte Inglés stores. I found an American Coffee house just outside of El Centro, Sip and Wonder where they went the further step of identifying their beans’ place of origin even if not so far as telling its variety or the finca, the farm it comes from.
Coffee houses in those years globally were becoming more and more identified with “specialty coffee’, a movement from within the coffee world that I had first started seeing in Cusco, Peru, in the early years of the second decade of this century, when I wrote about it.
Specialty Coffee was already developing a definition, organically in the work of coffee professionals around the world to improve coffee from farm to roasting, market, and the final drink, an entire chain of production. An association, The Specialty Coffee Association was formed in 2023 joining the American and European groups, both with long histories. This association ranks coffee on the basis of factors all along its path from plant to cup using a 100 point scale.
Among other factors, this scale emphasizes the distinctive qualities of fine coffee and its relationship to factors all along the global road from that tropical farm to a. cup, here in Alicante for example. Baristas now have a whole language to describe to qualities of flavor, similar to those used for fine wines.
The words specialty coffee, since they are part of a global system of production and marketing including global contests and conferences, are now widely recognized as symbols of quality.
The words are appearing all over Alicante, like desert flowers after a good rain. This year has seen the opening of many coffee houses, which contrast with the traditional coffee shops or bars / cafés of Spain. The latter are still place were people go for breakfast or to hangout after work or in the evening. Coffee Houses tend to draw a more international crowd and one more involved with international culture. It feels like every couple of blocks in this older, downtown part of the city, as well as in the old city, there are now coffee houses or specialty coffee stands on almost every other block. This has been a stunning growth.
As I wrote, I became part of this world while researching and writing on Cusco, Peru. Through various circumstances, I met the three young men from rural Cusco who became a brand, Three Monkeys. They have studied coffee along the entire chain, and have sought to improve every aspect from working with coffee producers to politicians, vendors, and so on to improve the coffee of Cusco and their own skills. Along the way they opened their own brand of specialty coffee, mostly from their family’s finca, a laboratory and training school in Cusco, and a Three Monkeys Coffee house in that Imperial City.
Their Coffee house was named number 22 in the List of the World’s Best 100 Coffee Shops. They also received a Sprudge Design award for their Coffee House.
The long lasting trio behind all this, Neto Solórzano, his nephew Iván Salas, and their friend Diego Huillca were named to the Forbes list of the Fifty Most Creative People in Peru for 2025.
Yesterday, I found out Diego had won the II National Championship in Latté Art for Peru. He and last year’s winner will now compete in the world championships to be held in San Diego, California and in Brussels.
Congratulations Dieguito. You so deserve this and congratulations to all the Monitos for this year of recognition and awards.
I remember vividly conversations with Diego and the other monkeys about the national and international Barista competitions and about the talent Diego so evidently showed already a decade ago and more. You and your team have worked hard, and I have been honored to meet you and talk with you, Neto, and Iván more than 12 years ago. You touched me then and continue to do so today with your drive, determination, skill and humanity.
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