Coffee in a Can
It may come as a shock to some, but canned coffee is an everyday staple in Japan. And to add to your bewilderment, it often comes out of a subway vending machine or corner convenience store. Gasp! Just pop open a can, and you’re good to go. The nation that introduced us to museum-worthy sashimi platters pioneered canned coffee, or kan kōhī, more than five decades ago, and a man named Miura Yoshitake is to thank.
“Our brand name, Miura, was chosen to pay homage to the creator of this innovation that has clearly had a lasting impact,” says Adam Lewis, founder of Toronto’s Miura coffee. Miura is a project that started with his “personal passion for coffee that demanded a better ready-to-drink coffee for [his] picky palate.” Lewis sought inspiration from Japan’s coffee extremes.
On the one hand, you have ubiquitous canned coffee, and on the other (and just as popular), high-precision artistic barista culture. By merging the two, he created Miura, a top-quality ready-to-drink cold coffee. Unlike the current popular cold brew coffee movement, Miura coffee is hot brewed “with absolute precision” following a Japanese recipe.
Lewis, who is half-Japanese on his mother’s side, says Japanese baristas invented the method and continue to practise it today.
“Because we’re brewing with hot water, the extraction is much more fragile, and the margin for error is far greater,” he explains.
The team must pay close attention to all variables during the brewing process, including grind size, water quality, coffee-to-water ratio and steep time.
“There’s no bitterness or sourness,” he explains, “which is often a product of over-extraction or oxidation.” The coffee is then filtered and flash-chilled.
The beans themselves come from the Nueva Segovia region in Nicaragua. “It’s a specialty grade bean that we developed a custom roast for, complementing our proprietary brewing process,” he says, adding that the beans are ethically sourced and Caravela, the parent company, is a certified B Corporation, meaning it meets the highest standards of social and environmental stringencies, transparency and sustainability.
For Lewis, though, experimenting with the perfect can of cold coffee moved by his cultural heritage really comes down to one thing: “satisfying my own selfish desires for barista-quality coffee I can grab out of my fridge on a daily basis.” Who can’t relate to that?
Miura
drinkmiura.com | @miuracoffee
