Why coffee

That’s a question we often get from our visitors. – “Because of childhood.” That’s the short version.

I started drinking coffee pretty early. Maybe my mom could say more precisely, but I think I was around ten. Back in the dark Soviet times, we had this ancient moka pot, made in Lviv by the way, called “Elvo.”

It was a terrible coffee maker. It didn’t leave the coffee in the bottom chamber like a proper moka pot should. Instead, it pushed the already brewed coffee back up into the ground coffee section and brewed it again. And it kept doing that until you unplugged it. Maybe that’s why the coffee from that thing could mess with your sleep for days?

I also tried to brew it as long as possible to make it stronger. Somehow we always had ground coffee. No idea where it came from, but we had it.

Around that time, we also got a book by Mykola Pucherov called “All About Coffee” (Н. Н. Пучеров “Всё о кофе”), which I still have and have read a few times. I even talked once with the widow of this brilliant man, but that’s a whole different story. The main thing is, that book, published in Kyiv in 1988, still has content that’s relevant today.

After that wild start, I went through every stage of a coffee lover’s journey: instant coffee – Lviv’s “Halka” and Indian instant coffee by “JFK Coffee,” granulated “Nescafe Gold,” ground “Jacobs Monarch,” whole bean “Blasercafé.” And of course, chicory coffee when everything was in short supply.

I still remember our weekend breakfast coffee, made by my mom. Back then, it was brewed black coffee with sweetened condensed milk. It was insanely delicious. You could even get something like that at the cafeteria on the first floor of our building.

Long story short, to be sipping coffee that costs around €1000 per kilo while chatting with my baristas in my own coffee shop, I had to go through all the stages of coffee evolution, one step at a time. And that definitely influenced what we offer in the market, and the level we’ve reached.

There was another moment. At one point, my wife and I started saving up for a full-cycle automatic coffee machine by “Gaggia,” sold by “Dim Kavy.” Back then, I thought that was the peak of coffee making. It’s kind of cute in hindsight. Instead of giving us gifts for holidays, we made our guests drop money into a box labeled “for the coffee machine.” We almost had enough. But we didn’t wait to finish and moved to Vienna.

So yeah. I think what I do now, and why Fenster exists in Vienna, all goes back to the warm and friendly way my family treated coffee when I was a kid, a teenager. Probably a lot of stories have this kind of explanation.