Hold on to your coffee cup for a moment and close your eyes. Now imagine yourself in a speak-easy-like coffee bar setting somewhere in downtown Tokyo. It’s gloomy except for some well-positioned lights above you. There’s barely any sound other than the quiet Jazz music in the background and the mellow clinkering of your Barista’s skillful hand movements. You’re already in anticipation of this multi-sensory multi-course experience that is upon you: Coffee Omakase.
Omakase (Japanese for I leave it up to you), a fine dining experience originating in the Japanese Sushi tradition is conquering not only Tokyo, but also other parts of the globe and their sophisticated audience craving the extraordinary. Now it’s entering the specialty coffee world.
Everything started with signature drinks about 25 years ago. A name that derives from a discipline during the World Barista Championships of creating a unique beverage featuring the very coffee the competitor chose for their 15 min performance.
Coffee shops picked up on that trend and are serving their own take on those exquisite coffee beverages, such as espresso tonic, or are creating their very own special drinks using home made syrups & cordials, seasonal ingredients and turning them into coffee mocktails. Cocktail classics such as Negroni are getting their caffeinated twist as well.
Another creative way of introducing a certain coffee to you, the customer, is a coffee or tasting flight, with which you’re probably familiar from the wine or craft beer industry.
Highlighting the origin and unique flavor of the coffee in different beverages a flight usually is served on a tray, an espresso, a milk beverage, and a signature beverage or coffee mocktail for example or different countries of coffee origin side by side.
An experience like this creates an atmosphere of slowing down and of diving deeper into the different flavors that open your taste buds to a whole new world of coffee. Coffee Omakase was born.
Coffee doesn’t serve as your daily caffeine fix anymore, but becomes an ingredient in these experimental culinary experiences that also involve smaller treats such as ice cream, pastries or fresh fruits.
Each Coffee Omakase experience curated by your Barista aims to not only highlight the very coffee it is featuring; it’s the star of the show. The Barista performing their highest form of hospitality and showcasing their topnotch creativity is making sure to tell you where it has been grown and most importantly who produced it.
One of the most exclusive places to date offering Coffee Omakase is Cokuun in Tokyo. Former World Barista Champion Hide Izaki and Runner-Up Miki Suzuki as your Baristas invite you and three other guests to a reservation-only experience. Inspired by the traditional Japanese tea ceremony they serve 4 courses using seasonal and local ingredients – from the water and the milk to the equipment and cups everything is made in Japan – in a 90 min tasting session offering a welcome drink, a filter coffee, milk beverage and a coffee mocktail.
This is one of Cokuun’s coffee mocktails prepared by Izaki-san himself.
Coffee Omakase is a creation of the specialty coffee industry making use of coffees that are of the highest quality from bean to cup and getting to the core of its flavor potential in its exclusive tasting experiences.
Coffee grown under certain conditions and quality standards can reach enormous prices at auctions – mostly sold to coffee buyers from China, Korea and Japan – world wide, such as Panama Geisha. At the 2024 Best of Panama auction some of the highest scoring lots ever resulted in a price of $10,000/kg green coffee.
Panama Geisha, one of the most precious among the Arabica varieties, got discovered on a farm in rural Panama in 1994, Hacienda La Esmeralda, on an altitude of above 1,400 meters, a crucial factor for its very fruity and floral flavor. This variety today is a great example of dedication, perseverance and its exceptional flavor. Hence it’s often used during World Barista competitions and Coffee Omakase experiences like the ones at Cokuun in Tokyo.
For the coffee industry Coffee Omakase is also a form of sustainable customer education bringing you closer to a certain farm and making its coffees more accessible to a wider audience.
Being a fruit coffee is highly dependent on environmental factors such as droughts or frost, same as with other seasonal fruits or vegetables. No coffee harvest season is the same; hence you should never expect the very same product in your cup.
Yet it doesn’t stop with harvesting the coffee cherries. It already starts with the soil. Packed with nutrients the plants often grow on the slopes of mountains and volcanoes in the tropics between the 24the latitude North and South of the Equator.
High quality coffees that are used for Coffee Omakase experiences are cultivated on Estates or Micro Lots in these areas. As a shade tree coffee thrives among native shrubs and trees such as citrus fruits, papaya, banana, macadamia, avocado or cocoa, flavors that you can find in coffees, too.
Before you even enter the sacred space of an Omakase Coffee experience – while making your reservations – you learn about the estate and the Terroir the coffee was grown, its characteristics, and the people behind.
Coffee Omakase menus will also tell you more about the processing, the way the two beans in one cherry are being extracted from the pulp, another crucial factor that is influential on what you are about to taste.
With an incredible number of 800, coffee has more aromas than wine and each processing method brings out more of these unique aromas and flavors before the coffee was even roasted, yet another factor for further flavor extraction.
Aside of the well known techniques, washed and sun dried, the processing of specialty coffees nowadays happens under certain conditions that will remind you of the beer or wine making industry once again, such as carbonic maceration or other fermentation techniques using different types of yeast.
Coffee Omakase experiences make you travel the world through and with coffee. They mostly are on reservation only, making them a special treat and the opportunity for you to experience coffee in a 5-course tasting menu introducing you to not only different brewing methods and coffee vessels ranging from ceramic cups to fancy cocktail glasses, and turning it into a feast for the senses.
Still got your coffee in hand? After leaving this adventurous coffee trip around the world intended to tickle your taste buds I take no guarantee you’d ever want to go back to your daily morning fix.
Wanna learn more about signature beverages and coffee mocktails? Head over here.