Korean Coffee · Part 6 You can order coffee in Korea in English almost anywhere. Knowing five phrases and two conventions will still get you a better cup and a shorter queue. 01 What happens at the counter You order and pay first, then wait. There is no tab and no paying afterwards. You will be handed a buzzer, or your number will be called, and you collect the drink yourself. You will be asked two questions. Hot or iced, and whether you are drinking in or taking away. Answer both before they ask and the transaction takes ten seconds. Tipping does not exist. There is no tip line, no jar, and leaving money on the counter causes confusion rather than pleasure. The price on the board is the price. 02 Five phrases that cover most of it English works in cities, but these help everywhere. Pronunciation below is rough but close enough to be understood. What you want Korean Say it as One iced americano 아이스 아메리카노 하나요 Ice americano hana-yo Hot, please ...

Korean Coffee · Part 5 Korean specialty coffee grew from a small circle of competitors into an industry with hundreds of roasteries. What changed first was supply, and what changed slowest was taste. 01 Green coffee was the first bottleneck Around 2010 there were only a handful of importers to buy from. If you roasted in Korea then, your options were counted on two hands. You took what those companies had brought in that season, and a coffee you liked might simply not exist here the following year. Today there are more than twice as many. Small importers now bring in single lots, competition lots and microlots, and a roaster in a provincial city can order the same coffee as one in Seoul. Nothing else in the last fifteen years changed the work as much as that did. Equipment followed the same curve. Roasters, grinders and measuring tools that had to be imported at painful cost became ordinary purchases, and Korean manufacturers began building their own. 02 It ...

Korean Coffee · Part 4 Most Korean cafes sell one drink in enormous volume and make their margin somewhere else. Knowing which is which changes what you should order. 01 Americano carries the menu One drink dominates in a way it does not elsewhere. Americano, usually iced, is the default order across the whole market from the cheapest chain to the most careful roastery. It is the cheapest item on most boards and the one most people are drinking. Espresso on its own is rare. It is on the menu, but ordering one will occasionally get a second glance. A handful of espresso bars have opened in recent years and they are treated as a specialist format rather than the norm. Latte is the second pillar. Iced more often than hot, and frequently flavoured. Vanilla, hazelnut and condensed milk versions sell steadily, and seasonal editions arrive every few months. 02 The rest of the board Non-coffee drinks are a full category, not an afterthought. Grain lattes made from...

Korean Coffee · Part 3 Korea passed 100,000 coffee shops a few years ago and kept going. The reason is less about how much coffee people drink than about who ends up opening a business here. 01 The number is larger than it sounds Government figures put the count above 100,000. Korea had roughly 51,000 coffee shops in 2016. It crossed 100,000 in 2022 and reached about 107,000 by 2024. That is on a population of around 51 million, in a country smaller than England. The market grew alongside it. The domestic coffee industry was valued at roughly 3.7 trillion won in 2024, up about a third from 2018. Nearly 300,000 people work in the sector. Density is what visitors notice. In a Seoul neighbourhood you can stand on one corner and see four or five cafes without turning your head. That is the part no statistic conveys. 02 Why so many people open one Careers end earlier here than people expect. Many office workers leave their main career in their fifties, well bef...

Korean Coffee · Part 2 A Korean cafe is built to be occupied, not passed through. Once you know that, the tall ceilings, the outlets at every table and the four-hour customers all make sense. 01 The room is the product Cafes here are larger than visitors expect. Two floors is common, and so are high ceilings and a full glass front. Money that a European cafe might put into the machine goes into the room. Seating is designed for staying. Tables are spaced further apart than in most countries, chairs have backs, and power outlets sit at the tables rather than hidden behind a sofa. None of that is accidental. There is almost no standing bar. The Italian model, where you drink an espresso at the counter in ninety seconds, barely exists here. You order, you take a buzzer, you sit down. 02 What people actually do in them A cafe is a study room and an office. Students revise, freelancers work, job seekers prepare for exams. There is a word for people who study in...

Korean Coffee · Part 1 Koreans keep ordering iced americano at minus 10 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit), and the numbers back it up. It is less about taste than about how coffee is bought and carried here. 01 It is not a small minority There is a word for it. Eoljukah, a contraction of a phrase meaning roughly "iced even if I freeze to death". It started as a joke about a stubborn preference and ended up describing ordinary behaviour. Winter sales figures are close to an even split. Starbucks Korea has reported that in January, in the middle of the Korean winter, iced americano still accounted for a little over half of all americano sales. In late autumn the share runs far higher than that. Convenience stores tell the same story: cups of ice keep selling through the last quarter of the year. Korean winters are not mild. Seoul in January sits below freezing for most of the month and regularly drops to minus 10 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit)....