Eng Lan Lam, proprietor of Nanyang Old Coffee
When it comes to Singapore coffee – or kopi (pronounced as koh-pee) as the locals call it – it all boils down to the way the beans are prepared. Roasted with sugar and margarine, local coffee is dark, strong and retains the smooth caramel and butter character of its roasting companions. As with many other local delicacies, Malaysia’s robust blend is a close cousin. The latter however, is brewed from Liberica beans while Singapore’s is from a blend of Robusta and Arabica.
Kopi is also different from some international gourmet coffee, says Eng Lam Lim, proprietor of Nanyang Old Coffee because of the quantity of coffee in each serving. “The punch is there because we use a lot of Robusta. Cappuccino for example, is twenty percent of coffee and eighty percent of milk. For us, it’s eighty percent of coffee.”
The extra punch makes all the difference. Older Singaporeans will recall pouring their kopi from a thick-rimmed cup – designed to keep the coffee warm – into a saucer, so it can cool quickly enough for them to get their caffeine fix before they head to work. Besides the quaint-looking cup and saucer (often with floral designs), one other unique coffee paraphernalia is the coffee pot with a long spout.
“In other countries it used for flowering plants,” Eng says, laughing. “This makes the coffee easier to pour and it gives the tarik (pronounced tar-rake) or ‘pull’ effect which cools and mixes the drink. When you tarik, the sugar and the air mixes and the kopi actually tastes better.”
A good old cup of Kopi-O
The use of the ‘flower pot’ is traditional. And according to Lim, coffee machines are not used because they don’t allow for “a personal touch”. If you think the big coffee chains have a monopoly on variety, just see what local coffeeshops can do with just coffee, milk and sugar – and without even the whipped option (see below). If you go to a local coffee shop often enough, the tou chiu (pronounced tao-chew), the equivalent of a barista, will know just how like your kopi – and perhaps even the quintessential kopi companions of kaya toast (coconut jam served between toast, pronounced kah-yah) and soft-boiled eggs.
THE HISTORY OF LOCAL TRADITIONAL COFFEE
Early coffee shops in Singapore were run by Hainanese immigrants who learnt how to make coffee from the British. Coffee was then served with butter, either added to the coffee or eaten separately to soothe the throat and alleviate the ‘heatiness’ of the drink, linking back to the Chinese idea of yin and yang or ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ foods. The Hainanese roasted coffee beans with sugar – a process influenced by the Spanish. Coffee was then a luxury product but over time, coffee drinking became widespread and coffeeshop culture localised to its present form.
How to Order Local Traditional Coffee
| Kopi (koh-pee) | coffee with condensed milk |
| Kopi-C (koh-pee see) | coffee with sugar and evaporated milk (the C is for ‘Carnation’, a popular evaporated milk brand) |
| Kopi-Kosong (koh-pee koh-song) | coffee with condensed milk, without sugar. (Kosong is Malay for ‘nothing’ or ‘zero’) |
| Kopi-O (koh-pee oh) | black coffee with sugar |
| Kopi-O-Kosong (koh-pee oh koh-song) | black coffee without sugar |
| Kopi-Peng (koh-pee p’eng) | iced coffee with sugar and condensed milk |
| Kopi-Siew-Dai (koh-pee seew da’i) | coffee with less condensed milk |
| Kopi-Ga-Dai (koh-pee gah da’i) | coffee with more condensed milk |
| Kopi-Suah (koh-pee swah) | a double order of Kopi |
| Kopi-Gao (koh-pee gau) | literally, ‘thick’ coffee (think double expresso) |
| Kopi-Di-Lo (koh-pee di loh) | even more concentrated coffee |
| Kopi-Poh (koh-pee p’oh) | A ‘light’ coffee. |
The addendums also apply to Teh (tea) e.g. Teh-O
I grew up drinking kopi and teh at our neighbourhood kopitiams. We used to pour the hot drink onto the saucer to cool it before we drank it. The kaya and butter or butter and sugar toast plus half-boiled egg with soya sauce and pepper were di rigeur. Yum
Grateful thanks to Mr Eng Lam Lim for an
extremely interesting insight into kopi.
This is something I must explore further!
Very interesting article, thanks. And, uhm, I think you left out my favorite: Kopi C kosong. A lot of expats like me like it that way