How the world actually drinks coffee

Espresso is not the world’s coffee, and Ethiopia shows why

Read enough coffee writing in English and you could conclude the planet divides into espresso drinkers and filter drinkers. It does not. Several of the oldest and largest coffee cultures on earth filter nothing, sweeten during brewing rather than after, and serve in quantities that would look like a mistake in a London cafe. The common thread across the seven below is that the vessel explains the drink.

In the country the plant comes from, coffee is most often made at home, from green beans, in front of the people who will drink it. Green coffee is washed and roasted in a flat pan over coals while the room fills with the smell, and the roasted beans are carried round for everyone to take in. They are pounded in a wooden mortar, the mukecha, then boiled in a round-bellied clay pot with a narrow neck, the jebena, and poured from a height into small handleless cups so that the grounds stay behind in the pot.

Three rounds are served from the same grounds, traditionally named abol, tona and baraka, the last carrying a sense of blessing. Incense burns, popcorn is handed round, and the whole thing takes the better part of an hour, which is the point of it. Jebena buna is a way of holding people in a room, and it is the ancestor of every coffeehouse described in a history of coffee in five moments.

The cezve: Turkey, Greece, the Balkans and the Levant

From Yemen the drink moved north, and the method that travelled with it is the oldest one still in daily use. Coffee is ground to a powder finer than espresso, measured into a small long-handled pot with cold water and, crucially, any sugar, because it is sweetened during brewing and not after. The pot is brought slowly to the point where a foam rises, which is lifted off and shared between the cups, and then usually returned to the heat once or twice more.

Nothing is filtered. The grounds settle, the last centimetre is not drunk, and a glass of water comes alongside. Sweetness is ordered as a grade rather than added at the table, from unsweetened through medium to sweet. The pot is a cezve in Turkish, a briki in Greek, and the drink itself carries a different national adjective in every country that makes it, which is a live political matter and not a detail to be smoothed over. Greece, meanwhile, spends most of the summer drinking the shaken iced frappé it invented in Thessaloniki in the 1950s, and the espresso freddo that has largely overtaken it.

Italy: the counter, and ninety seconds

The Italian caffè is a small volume of dark-roasted coffee drunk standing at a bar counter, often in less time than it took to order. Two prices are normal: one at the counter and a higher one for table service, which is why visitors sometimes think they have been overcharged for sitting down. Milk drinks belong to the morning, an idea Italians hold more loosely than the internet claims but which is real enough. In Naples the caffè sospeso, a coffee paid for in advance for whoever comes in next needing one, is a genuine local custom rather than a marketing story.

Place	Vessel	What arrives
Ethiopia	Clay jebena	Small unfiltered cups, three rounds from one pot
Turkey and Greece	Cezve or briki	Thick sweetened coffee with foam, grounds settled, water alongside
Italy	Espresso machine	About 25 ml, dark roast, drunk standing
Nordic countries	Batch or pour-over filter	A large light-roast filter cup, refilled
Vietnam	Phin	Strong robusta dripped over condensed milk, usually iced
Cuba	Stovetop or espresso	A thimble of coffee whipped to a sugar foam, often shared
Australia	Espresso machine	Flat white, long black, a sit-down cafe meal

The Nordic countries: filter, light roast, and most of it

Finland drinks more coffee per person than anywhere else, with Norway, Iceland, Denmark and Sweden close behind, and almost all of it is filter. Roasts are light by European standards, which suits the method and gives a clean, acidic, tea-like cup that a dark roast would bury. The drink is domestic and constant: pots at work, pots at home, and in Sweden the institution of fika, a proper pause with something sweet rather than a paper cup carried to a desk. Scandinavian roasters were also central to the shift described in cafe culture and the three waves.

Vietnam, Cuba and Australia

Vietnam grows robusta at enormous scale, a legacy of French colonial planting, and drinks it accordingly. A small metal phin filter sits on the glass and drips a very strong, low-acid, chocolatey brew onto sweetened condensed milk, which is stirred up and poured over ice as cà phê sữa đá. Hanoi adds cà phê trứng, egg yolk whipped with condensed milk into a warm custard on top of the coffee, invented in the 1940s when fresh milk was scarce.

Cuban cafecito is espresso or stovetop coffee, with sugar whipped into the first few drops to make a pale foam called espuma, then served in thimble cups. A colada is the same coffee in a larger cup with a stack of small ones, bought for a workplace and shared out, which makes it a social object rather than a drink size.

Australia and New Zealand built their cafe culture on post-war Italian and Greek migration, and it grew into something distinct: espresso-based, milk-forward, seated, and attached to a serious breakfast menu. The flat white came out of that scene in the 1980s, with Sydney and Auckland both claiming it and neither able to prove it. If the difference from a latte is the part you want settled, it is taken apart in flat white against latte.