Drink This Now: Kyoto-Style Iced Coffee at Cafe Demitasse

In terms of cool food-science-nerd equipment, Cafe Demitasse wins. The Kyoto-style iced coffee setup is a beauty to behold, all glass and metal and orbs and tubes. Cold water drips slowly through the apparatus, extracting a wholly different flavor from the coffee. It takes 14 hours to make three liters of the stuff.

Demitasse is owned by Bobak Roshan, a lawyer who parlayed his love for coffee into this Little Tokyo sliver of a spot that opened last August. The cafe carries coffees from a number of roasters including Handsome and Cafecito Organico. The Kyoto-style iced coffee currently is being brewed with Augie's San Juan Bosco from El Salvador.

Cafe Demitasse serves the iced coffee in cold sake carafes, the kind with an interior chamber for ice, so as to keep the coffee cold while avoiding dilution by the ice.The flavor rings amazingly clear, with far less acidity than standard coffee, and lots of chocolate and bourbony notes. The whole experience, from the mad-scientist equipment to the act of sitting and enjoying, is coffee on a different, more thoughtful plane.

Credit: B. Rodell

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