STiR coffee and tea magazine

46 STiR coffee and tea / Issue 6, 2018 (December / January 2019) By Josh Doyle C osmopolitan Singapore, with its open economy and love of free trade, is a hub for busi- ness in Asia. It's also spilling over with a vibrant coffee and tea culture fueled by colorful locals who enjoy the global feel of their open border city, but wouldn't let go of their tea and coffee culture for the world. The coffee industry there has two faces. One lives in the takeaway shops selling 800 cups each morning to crowds of bankers and executives from foreign firms setting roots in the city. Or the specialty coffee houses popping up in the suburbs that are leading Southeast Asia in innovation. The other Singaporean coffee, with its roasted caramel sweetness, isn't found in cafés. It's hiding in the street side eateries with five fans on the wall and a buzz of activity. It's here in these kopitiams, affectionately known as hawker centers, that you'll find locals from every income bracket and all age groups sipping as many as 4 to 6 cups per day of Singapore's national drink, better known as kopi. Fueling these hawker centers is a large amount of high-caffeine robusta beans, not the arabica that has become standard in Western cafés. "The culture [in kopitiams], they like a strong coffee," Victor Mah, president of the Singapore Coffee Association, told STiR. "Not ones with the fancy acidity... The roast is a little bit darker than what you see in an indie café." What the robusta beans lose in quality, they make up for in Singapore's classic roasting recipe. That means being freshly roasted in a combination of butter, salt, and sugar — not your average roast, but then this is not your average coffee scene. Add in a dollop of condensed milk, and you have a drink Singaporeans young and old line up for several times a day. This steady need for robusta has made an attractive market for exporters to take advantage of Singapore's open door policy on trade. "That's the beauty about Singapore, we don't have any barriers or taxes. You can bring coffee in from ASEAN countries, Africa. There's no import duty," Mah reminds STiR. Coffee exporters pay only a GST tax of around 7%. Regional exporters in Vietnam and Indonesia have captured a good slice of Singapore's ro- busta market. But in the skyscraper lined streets of Singapore's financial district and in cafés where Singapore's hip kids hang out, announcing you drink cheap robusta is like shouting a bad word. Fuelling the financial district are well-positioned cafés capitalizing on take-away customers, putting a quick coffee in the hands of bankers filing into their offices. "Some of them do 800 or 1,000 cups take-away," said Mah. He adds that margins can be tight, since cafés don't skimp Singapore's Cosmopolitan Coffee and Tea Culture A strong coffee often accompanies breakfast

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