Something’s brewing at Typica. In the narrow slip of a light-filled café at the rear of Shaw Parade, behind a bar made of reclaimed wood, Sum Leong, an energetic woman with an expressive face, pours coffee beans onto a digital scale and funnels them into a red grinder, catching the result in a cone filter made of undyed paper. Then she dips her head, inhales, and comes up smiling.

‘I don’t want to make money. I just want to brew good coffee,’ she says.
It’s a far cry from your local Starbucks, where the queue snakes down the counter and the barista moves fast, slapping and pulling the filter in and out of the espresso machine like an automaton. At Typica you might wait, depending on how many customers are ahead of you, ten minutes for a hot cuppa. But you’ll have a choice of seven beans and several blends (you can even request a custom blend, if you like), and your beans will be ground to order before they’re transformed, with the help of a double glass-chambered apparatus that looks more like a piece of laboratory equipment than a coffee maker and with the care and affection usually reserved for diapering a newborn, into a beverage with more flavour notes than you probably ever thought could be found in a mere cup of joe.

Two-month-old Typica is the latest addition to the Klang Valley’s miniscule population of what you might call ‘cult’ coffee shops: small owner-operated enterprises known to and frequented by an as-of-yet relatively limited number of coffee enthusiasts. Though the shops’ proprietors profess primary allegiance to different brewing methods (Leong and Eric Chua, owner of Chinatown’s ikopi, favour Taiwanese-style siphon and iced drip, while at Petaling Jaya’s Coffee Ritual owner-barista Chung Yeh Chin focuses on espresso-based brews) they are united by a passion for the art of extracting maximum flavour from the bean. For lovers of the dark stuff, that makes these cafes islands in a caffeinated sea of mediocrity.

Like most Malaysians, Leong, Chua, and Chin grew up thinking of ‘coffee’ with the kopitiam brew and the freeze-dried crystals in Nescafe jars, a mindset that changed thanks to an encounter with siphon-brewed coffee.

Siphon brewers consist of two stacked glass chambers held together with a rubber gasket and separated by a tube containing a paper or cloth filter. Coffee grounds are placed in the top chamber while the bottom holds water, which is heated over an open flame until its volume expands, forcing it up through the tube into the top chamber, soaking the grounds. As the coffee gurgles away (a sign not that it’s boiling, but that water vapour is passing up through the liquid and exiting as bubbles) the coffee maker stirs it with a wooden spoon or paddle to keep the grounds from clumping together. It’s done when the maximum amount of flavour’s been leeched from the grounds, a moment that skilled brew masters can pinpoint with a whiff; newbies use a timer. The bottom chamber is then wiped with a cool, damp rag, lowering its temperature and creating vacuum pressure that draws the coffee back down through the tube.

The siphon brewing process makes for great theatre, but it’s not all for appearance’s sake. At the end of all those ministrations what you’re left with is coffee that boasts an incomparable ‘cleanness’, a flavour that displays notes often difficult to detect in coffee brewed with other methods.

‘Is this really coffee?’ Chua says he asked himself after his first taste of siphon brew, taken at a Japanese department store in Singapore in the 1980s. ‘I was struck by the method, and the high price,’ he says, ‘but mostly by the taste. It was a little sour, bitter, and sweet, really different to Malaysian kopi.’

A decade and a half later, Chua opened ikopi with Leong, who’d become enamoured of siphon-brewed coffee while attending university in Taiwan. ‘Honestly speaking, it was a bit strange – so bitter,’ she says of her first taste. ‘But the more I tried it the more I developed my palate, and I found that each variety of beans has its own flavour.’

It was then, Leong says, that she began to understand the ‘big picture’ behind gourmet coffee: ‘I thought, “Oh, so this is the original taste of coffee!” And then I became a real coffee drinker.’

Leong convinced a Taiwanese café owner to teach her how to use the siphon apparatus and began brewing coffee for herself at home. A couple of years after returning to KL she opened a small café (predating ikopi by several years) on Petaling Street called Ou, serving siphon brews and espresso-based drinks. ‘Espresso was very popular, but we only sold maybe one siphon brew every day,’ she recalls. Nonetheless she remained loyal to the more unwieldy, but also more sensory, process. ‘When I brew with the siphon it’s like the coffee is talking to me,’ says Leong. ‘With the siphon it’s what I do and how I do it’ that determines the flavour of the coffee.

(Both Leong and Chua’s cafes also offer iced coffee made with another chemistry experiment-look-alike apparatus that drips iced water onto coffee grounds at such a slow rate that it takes six hours to make four cups of coffee. The result is a deliciously rich, strong beverage with nary a hint of bitterness or harshness.)

Chung too was drawn into the world of coffee by siphon brew, which the former web developer stumbled across at a UCC (a Japanese chain) kiosk in Mid Valley Megamall back in the mid-’90s. His interest in the device and its history (the siphon brewer was invented in Europe in the early 1800s) morphed into a general fascination with the history and culture of coffee worldwide. But as perhaps befits a former IT employee, Chung’s approach to creating the ultimate cup of coffee is driven more by science than art.

‘Brewing is the most challenging part of making coffee,’ he explains, and so it follows that a well-calibrated, professional-grade espresso machine, by exposing coffee grounds to water heated to the correct temperature for just the right amount of time, is the most sure-fire means to a good cup. ‘When you get the science right, the art comes naturally,’ says Chung. Ironically the Coffee Ritual proprietor, who makes perhaps the best long flat white this side of Sydney, is more of a black tea than a coffee lover; he indulges in a latte only once or twice a week.

In the end though, brewing method and the brewer’s skill can do little to save a cup of coffee if the beans are of poor quality. Asked if he thinks coffee made in an espresso machine is ‘better’ than that made with a siphon pot Chung responds with an emphatic ‘no’. ‘The best coffee is the freshest coffee you can get,’ he says, referring to the amount of time elapsed between roasting date and brewing.

‘Freshness is the key,’ agrees Leong, noting that Typica’s beans are used within two weeks of roasting. Quality in the cup can be kicked up a further notch if the beans are ground within two to three minutes of brewing, she adds.

Old beans are one of the major reasons for the lacklustre cuppa served in most Klang Valley cafes, says KF Chan, a gourmet coffee connoisseur whose love of the bean has inspired him to devote countless hours pursuing the ultimate espresso pull (which he calls a ‘god-shot’, or a cup ‘blessed by God’) on his home machine, an obsession that he chronicles on his blog ‘Coffee in Malaysia’ (kfchan.wordpress.com), and shares with a like-minded coterie at occasional coffee shop outings. Chan credits Starbucks with raising the profile of gourmet coffee locally, but notes with disdain that beans they sell to home brewers lack a roast date: ‘That’s a sure sign they’re not fresh.’

The difference between fresh beans brewed well and old beans brewed poorly is phenomenal, says Chan who, a decade or so ago, began reading everything he could find on coffee. ‘The more I learned the less satisfied I was with what’s available here.’ Sampling locally-made brews, he found none of the notes, such as sweetness and chocolaty-ness, described by espresso lovers. ‘When you learn how good espresso could be and you taste espresso like that, the only thing you think is, “why pay so much for coffee like this?”’

Though the local coffee scene has improved, Chan says, its still has a long way to go. For lovers of gourmet coffee – or anyone interested in exploring the wider contours of the coffee landscape – shops like Coffee Ritual, Typica, and ikopi offer a glimmer of hope. But they’re up against popular beliefs, derived mostly from Malaysia’s traditional kopitiam culture, of what a cup of coffee should be: thick, black, and cheap.

It’s not a matter of one versus the other (as Chung observes, ‘kopitiam coffee is a precious part of our heritage,’ and ikopi owner Chua enjoys the occasional cup of kopi kaow), but of widening the Valley’s caffeine horizons. Before dipping your toe into the world of gourmet coffee, put aside your kopitiam-bred expectations and ‘consider coffee as being about more than bitterness,’ says Chan. While espresso takes well to milk, siphon brew should ideally be drunk black. ‘Sip a little, roll it around your mouth, swallow, and wait,’ advises Chua, for notes like sourness and sweetness, and an ever-so-slight effervescence on the tongue, to appear. ‘Let your tongue and mouth tell you how you feel.’ If you just can’t countenance the beverage black, try a tall, cool glass of iced drip coffee, which is served slightly sweetened.

Allowing your coffee to cool a bit will allow its flavour to come out, says Leong, who believes that the best match for a cup of siphon brew isn’t a sugar bowl and a milk pitcher, but a well-made dessert.

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Coffee Ritual 35 Jalan 14/20, Section 14, PJ (03 7956 1080). Western and local foods in addition to coffee.

ikopi 1st floor,  6 Jalan Panggong, KL (03 2078 7328). A selection of dishes in addition to siphon and ice-drip coffees, as well as matcha lattes.

Typica GL-08, GF Shaw Parade (in the back), Jalan Changkat Thambi Dollah, KL (03 2145 0328). Offers a selection of homemade cakes to go with your cuppa.