Near Nippori station on the Yanaka-Ginza shopping street is a specialty coffee roaster called Yanaka Coffee. This is a coffee chain that now has over 30+ locations, but as the name might suggest originally opened right here back in 2000.
They stock a wide variety of beans that they roast on the spot. If you’re in a hurry, you can choose from a select few beans that were freshly roasted earlier that day. Otherwise, you can place an order, and the beans will be roasted in about 10 - 15 minutes. You can also order ahead of time on their app, so you can come to the store and pick it up when you are ready. The app is fully in Japanese, but if you can handle that, when we went they were doing a 500 yen discount for first-time app users.
They also sell hot and iced coffee at 600 yen for a cup. In this case, you don’t get to choose the bean, but they have coffee available with two different beans (one for hot, one for iced). I assume if you come back on different days you will get to try out the different beans.
The beans were priced in the 2000 to 3500 yen range for 200 grams. I’ll admit I was a bit tempted by their newly stocked bean - the Ephrem African Winner from Burundi. However the one they had already pre-roasted today was this Ethopian Yirgacheffe Hirut and Mahder which was priced at 2,330 yen for 200g.
Since it was roasted that day, I decided to wait a week before brewing our first cup. (We also bought beans from Aoyama Coffee Roaster on the same day so we had plenty to keep us going in the meantime).
I played around with the grind size and temperatures a couple of times, but what I landed on was 88°C (I suppose fairly standard, considering it’s a high roast) plus a grind size of 12 clicks (not so standard, but I found it drained very quickly compared to a normal bean) which resulted in a very smooth cup of coffee.
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