Freshen Up With Coffee From A Sock

[churchill]

Tibor Krausz visits Grandpa Lee's coffee shop in a province to the east of Bangkok and finds a popular curiosity regularly visited by the rich and famous. Pae Lee still starts work at 5am every day and never takes a day off

Wednesday August 12th 2009

Lee Sata aka Grandpa Lee in his coffee shop. Photograph: Tibor Krausz

Grandpa Lee scoops coffee into a long sock and slowly pours boiling water through it into a pan. He then recants the rich brew through another stocking-like filter into a tumbler. He takes an appraising sip and nods. Another cup of kafe boran, or traditional Thai-style coffee, is ready to be served. You can drink it straight or syrupy sweet with lashings of caramel and condensed milk.

Lee Sata, or Pae (grandpa) Lee, brews his coffee the way he’s done for the past 72 years – in the same cramped little coffee shop where he first started serving customers in 1937. Back then he was 14 and coffee was still a novelty in Thailand. These days Bangkok alone has 89 Starbucks. Yet thanks to its old-world charm the elderly Chinese-Thai man’s homemade brew has become a popular curiosity. Coffee lovers from the capital, including the rich and famous, flock to Pae Lee’s simple coffee shop with its six little round tables ringed by wooden stools at Klong Suan market, a century-old riverside bazaar in neighbouring Chach­oengsao province.

In times past the market serviced boats and crews on their way to Bangkok. Although riverine trade has since diminished, produce-laden dinghies paddled by women in flat-top bamboo-leaf hats still ply the toffee-hued canals clogged with water hyacinth.

Pae Lee used to collect fresh rain­water in ceramic jars to make his coffee. Nowadays bottled water makes for a more hygienic alternative. Wearing a white singlet, the diminutive coffeemaker greets visitors with a thumbs-up and boyish grin before disappearing into the tiny kitchen with its blackened walls to tend to his saucepans, cooking pots and sock filters.

Old customer favourites, he notes, include oliang ice coffee, a blend of coffee, corn and soya beans liberally sweetened before being decanted into a plastic bag of shaved ice to be slurped with a straw on the go. “I didn’t plan to make coffee all my life,” Pae Lee says. “But my shop became popular as a meeting place for the local community.”

After seven decades of making coffee, Pae Lee, who was born above the shop and sleeps upstairs, still starts work at 5am. He never takes a day off. “Coffee is the secret of longevity,” says the vivacious octogenarian, who raised nine children. “I love making it and I love drinking it.”

http://www.guardianweekly.co.uk/?page=edit...02&catID=23

[Zpete]

I've seen vendor along Sukhimvit making coffee like that.

Not being a sweet tooth, I shudder at the thought of drinking it.

Love me coffee tho.