JOHOR BARU, Oct 12 – Here is a lesson I remembered from the early days of specialty coffee in Malaysia: Many baristas and café owners would tell me how a coffee shop could never survive on coffee alone.
No, you can’t just sell espressos and long blacks, cappuccinos and caffè lattes. You have to sell food, be it basic pastries like croissants or mini pies or more involved products such as made-to-order sourdough sandwiches or even pasta, entire meals in themselves.
But I have seen cafés when travelling abroad where all that is sold is coffee. Bangkok. Auckland. Tokyo. São Paulo. It can be done.
Not in Malaysia, came the answer. Malaysian customers need food.
So I acquiesced in their professional wisdom. After all, they are the ones working in the coffee industry, not me. I just bought the coffee they sold and drank it. What did I know?
Still I couldn’t help but imagine cafés in Malaysia that just sold coffee... and not only survived, but thrived.
When will the day come?
Fast forward a decade and I found myself in a café in Johor Baru that just sold coffee. No food menu. And this café has not only survived, but has arguably thrived in their single-minded pursuit of coffee excellence.
Founded in 2013 and located in Southkey, not far from JB’s bustling main thoroughfare of Jalan Tebrau, Brewsmith is a boutique coffee roaster and retailer.
The former means that they are a small-scale specialty coffee roastery; the latter is more wide in terms of what it encompasses: beyond selling coffee equipment and supplies, Brewsmith also conducts coffee-related workshops, runs mobile coffee catering and offers café consulting.
Which meant I felt confident enough to order an espresso, a challenging beverage even for the best of baristas. What I got was a perfect shot – balanced, rich and flavourful, with just the right amount of syrupiness.
Currently Brewsmith offers half a dozen different coffees for espresso lovers. There are three natural processed beans (Brazil Fazenda Rio Brilhante, Ethiopia Bensa Regessa and Nicaragua Mierisch Finca Los Placeres Bourbon) and two washed (Colombia Popayan Reserve and Guatemala SHB Antigua Pastoral).
Of particular interest is the Kenya Nyeri Ruru, which underwent an anaerobic natural process. The resultant flavours ranged from berries (raspberries and blackcurrants) to more complex notes such as sarsaparilla and Pinot Noir.
Which doesn’t mean my espresso tasted like a mix between Sarsi and red wine. Let’s just say it had layers of flavour.
Coffee can be like human beings too – recall that classic line from Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself, 51”: I am large, I contain multitudes.
This simply means that there is a brew or cuppa for everyone and every mood on any given day.
The aforementioned anaerobic natural processing is repeated in the filter coffee selection. The Columbia Huila Palestina Linarco Rodriguez Geisha received the same process and promised tantalising flavour notes such as fermented cherries, plums and umeshu (Japanese plum liqueur).
Still it’s Brewsmith’s Ethiopia Hambela Wamena Wate that won our hearts as a pour-over coffee. I tasted lemon peels and orange blossoms; maybe not the bergamot the barista attested to (the power of suggestion will only go that far) but it was lovely enough.
I didn’t need a croissant or a sourdough sandwich to make my coffee complete. Not at all.
As it is, Brewsmith is reflective of a new trend of coffee business owners that have found a way to bypass offering food at their shops by doubling down on their main product line: coffee. This could mean anything from selling coffee grinders and drippers to engaging in micro-roasting.
In some ways, the indie coffee scene in JB has slowly been growing then outpacing that of Klang Valley without similar expectations placed upon them.
I observed how this started with Sweet Blossom Coffee Roasters, a pioneer of JB’s specialty coffee industry. They went from being a little more than a pop-up to roasting their own coffee beans and selling these online to customers all over the country.
Along the way, Sweet Blossom slowly phased out their food menu: first by stopping any in-house food production to focus on coffee, instead opting for third-party cake suppliers, before finally biting the bullet and doing away with food altogether.
The same philosophy is employed here in Brewsmith. Their customers come for the coffee and the coffee alone.
Well, the coffee and maybe the bare-bones aesthetics of the shop. Beyond the now commonplace white café walls and desaturated tones of the wood-centric furnishings, what catches one’s eye the most is the Tree.
Yes, the tree – with its birch-grey trunk and sweeping arms of dead branches – commands the space inside the shop, and by extension, the attention of customers.
One can almost hear “Old Tom Bombadil” being sung by Rufus Wainwright in the background. (No hobbits in sight, however.)
Brewsmith proves that all you need for a remarkable coffee shop is a tree, a bar and a roastery. All you need is coffee.
We finished our visit with milk coffee, a couple of flat whites. Not much of latte art, just a simple tulip, but this sort of fits with the theme. The minimalism, all the better to focus on the taste of the coffee.
My cup rested on a tree stump as I appreciated the sweetness of a day that has finally come.
Brewsmith Coffee Roasters
C-1-12 Block C, The Lakefront, Persiaran Southkey 1, Kota Southkey, Johor Baru
Open Tue-Sun 11am-6pm; Mon closed
Web: https://www.brewsmithcoffee.com
IG: https://www.instagram.com/brewsmithcoffee/
FB: https://www.facebook.com/brewsmithcoffee/
* This is an independent review where the writer paid for the meal.
* Follow us on Instagram @eatdrinkmm for more food gems.
