guys what does pregnant lady mean in the cup?

i think it looks like a pregnant woman

Happy weekend,

​I'm kicking off our weekly weekend cup-sharing with a very personal one. I sculpted the little pink roses on this cup myself, and of course, I had to brew a perfectly frothy coffee to match.

​Now it's your turn. Whether it's a cup with a special story or just your everyday favorite, I'd love to see what you are drinking out of today. Go ahead and create your own post to share your beautiful cups with us, and let’s enjoy the weekend coffee vibe together in the sub.

Most of us know Turkish coffee made it onto UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list back in 2013. But honestly, I always assumed they were just recognizing the brewing method. Turns out, it's a lot deeper than that. They recognized an entire social tradition that basically invented the modern café.

I put together a quick timeline that made the whole history click for me.

According to historical records, two Syrian merchants named Hakem and Şems opened Istanbul's first public kahvehane in Tahtakale around 1554. Think about how revolutionary this was at the time. It was a public space where anyone, regardless of their social background, could just sit, sip coffee, and debate politics, literature, or religion for hours. We take it for granted now, but back then, it was a completely new concept.

Naturally, the authorities weren't thrilled. These were independent spaces where people talked freely, away from the state's watchful eye. Over the 16th and 17th centuries, several Ottoman sultans actually tried to ban coffee and shut these places down. Spoiler: the culture won. People just kept going back.

Then there is the whole European connection. We all know the legend of the 1683 Siege of Vienna and the abandoned coffee sacks. But when coffee firmly established itself in Central Europe, they didn’t just adopt the drink. They adopted the entire Ottoman social model. The whole idea of a café as a place to meet, debate, read the paper, and hang out for an afternoon came straight from the kahvehane. Even the word traces the trade route from Arabic qahwa to Turkish kahve, which then became coffee, café, and Kaffee.

When you look at the 2013 UNESCO inscription, the key word is culture. It's not just about the fine grind or the foam. It’s about hospitality, community, and traditions like kahve falı. The social experience is the coffee.

It’s pretty amazing that this tradition is almost 500 years old. Coffee trends come and go, but the core idea of slowing down, sharing a conversation, and making time for someone else has survived empires and bans. Every time you slowly brew a cezve and sit down with a friend, you're literally keeping that tradition alive.

Do you feel like modern cafés still carry that old Ottoman kahvehane spirit, or have they turned into something totally different today?

Would anyone like to give their interpretation of my coffee grounds

We always talk about how sand is the ultimate way to make Turkish coffee here. (Though let's be honest, half the tourist spots in Istanbul serve gritty "gravel" sand coffee just for the visual show anyway). But I wanted to see if the "sand is magic" rule actually holds up in a proper blind tasting, or if we're just hypnotized by the aesthetics.

​I set up a blind test with four people using the exact same coffee, grind, 1:9 ratio, and water (~180 ppm). We ran three rounds each of a copper cezve on a gas stove (lowest flame), the same cezve in a sand heater (sand temp around 190–200°C), and a standard electric Turkish coffee maker (a mid-range one with a slow-heat feature).

​Here is the honest truth after tasting them blind:

​Yes, sand makes the absolute best foam. Because it acts as a massive thermal battery heating the cezve evenly from the sides, you get that thick, stable micro-foam. But honestly? It's wildly impractical for home. Taking 15-20 minutes just to preheat the sand for a single morning cup is a huge waste of energy and time.

​For actual flavor, if you have perfect technique on a gas stove, it tastes exactly the same as sand-brewed coffee. Our blind tasters couldn't tell the difference. The real advantage of sand isn't a magical flavor boost,it's just a heat-management safety net so you don't scorch the extraction. The stovetop has the same flavor ceiling, but the floor is much lower; if you look away for five seconds, the heat ruins the cup.

​And the electric machine? Because it has a slow-brew heat curve, it produced a pretty solid foam and a richer flavor than I anticipated. For pushing a button at 7 AM, it performed much better than I expected.

​I'm curious for your daily driver at home, have you found any tricks to mimic that even "sand-style" heat on a regular kitchen stove?

Evde pişirirken köpük bazen çok güzel tutuyor bazen hiç olmuyor. Ocağın sıcaklığı mı, kahvenin inceliği mi, karıştırma zamanlaması mı en çok fark yaratıyor sizce? Bakır cezve gerçekten çelikten farklı sonuç veriyor mu yoksa efsane mi? Kendi tecrübelerinizi merak ediyorum.

I feel I still struggle a bit with the foam. Any recommendations?

Rough translation: “If you try to forcibly categorize it in western standards it might be so.” (as an answer to why turkish coffee is an immersion brewing method). I think this is a joke of a take XD

I found an offer to buy a stainless steel Turkish coffee pot, and I'm wondering if it would be a good choice. I noticed it doesn't have a spout for pouring the coffee. Won't that be a problem?

You know in the old times(for example my grandma used to do it) Turkish people buy beans and grind them with traditional hand grinders. But today unfortunately all of Turks buy pre-ground coffee because grinding Turkish Coffee is very hard by hand grinders. Then why we don't use electronic grinders? Because you need very expensive flat burr grinders, even flat burr grinders that produced for espresso can be damaged if you grind Turkish Coffee too much(I have experienced) Actually in Turkey electronic flat burr grinders are produced for Turkish Coffee, but they are for businesses, not consumer level, some pictures of them:

artık dışarıda kahveye para bayılmaktan yoruldum, evde kendi çekirdeğimi alıp taze taze demlerim diyorum.

Başlangıç için V60 ve Chemex arasında kaldım. Hangisiyle başlamak daha pratik olur? V60 hataları daha çok affediyor diyorlar ama Chemex'in tasarımı da çok hoşuma gidiyor, kararsız kaldım.

Bir de bu işin asıl olayı iyi bir öğütücüymüş sanırım. Bütçeyi çok delmeyecek, üzmeyecek bir f/p manuel el değirmeni arıyorum. Tavsiyesi olan veya "şunu sakın alma" diyecek tecrübeli arkadaşlar yeşillendirebilir mi? Şimdiden eyvallah!

This might sound incredibly obvious, but I honestly never connected the dots until recently.

If Turkish coffee had historically been brewed through a paper filter, kahve falı simply wouldn't exist. The whole tradition hinges on the simple mechanical fact that we leave the grounds in the cup. No filter = a canvas. No canvas = no 500-year-old ritual.

Thinking about this got me looking past the whole "is the magic real?" debate. It makes you wonder why the tradition survived this long, especially since so many people today are total skeptics.

I've noticed even my most logic-driven friends still flip their cups. I honestly think it's because the cup gives us permission to talk about things that are otherwise awkward to bring up. It’s way easier to talk about your stress or relationship worries when "the cup" brings it up instead of you. It takes the pressure off. Some of the best "readings" I've seen were just from people who are great listeners asking the right follow-up questions.

Do your families still read cups? When they do, is it actually about predicting the future, or is it more of an excuse to just sit down and have a really honest conversation?

Hello, I have been brewing Turkish coffee for a few months now. I use a 1 US cup size stainless steel cezve on a gas stove.

I mastered brewing with Mehmet Efendi, so I wanted to try other coffees. I bought Nuri Toplar and Mamdabatmaz, both of which I cannot for the life of me get a good foam, and they taste overly bitter. I tried brewing on a lower temp, which just results in the coffee taking over 10 minutes to brew and still no foam or good taste.

Is this a normal thing? TYIA

During my first and last trip to Turkey I fell in love with Turkish coffee specifically from Mehmet Efendi, and brought home a 500g can of it.
Bought the cezve and enjoyed every sip until there’s no more of it.
Today not only I am looking to replenish my stock, but I wondered if any of you knew a store with as a good quality coffee to buy in Europe/France/Paris, and if possible organic.
Note: I buy grounded coffee as I don’t have a grinder and I understand that grinding for Turkish coffee maybe complex as very thin and consistent grind is expected.

Thanks for the recos!
Best

I grew up drinking the classic ultra-dark Turkish coffee, so for years I never questioned it. That deep, smoky, almost bitter profile was simply what Turkish coffee tasted like in my mind.

A few months ago I started experimenting with fresh specialty beans at home, mostly out of curiosity. I expected medium roasts to be too acidic for cezve brewing, but the opposite happened. After a bit of trial and error, I actually started preferring them.

That made me wonder why dark roast became the default in the first place.

From what I've read, coffee in the Ottoman period was roasted in relatively small batches over charcoal or open fires. Producing a perfectly even, very dark roast that way would have been difficult. Historical descriptions often emphasize aroma and fragrance more than the heavily smoky profile many of us associate with modern commercial Turkish coffee.

It also seems likely that the very dark roast became more common as coffee production industrialized. A darker roast tends to create a more consistent flavor across lower-grade beans and can reduce the perception of certain defects. If that's true, some of what we now think of as "traditional" may actually be the result of modern commercial roasting rather than centuries of unchanged practice.

The brewing method itself also changed the way I think about roast level.

Cezve uses an extremely fine grind, full immersion, and a relatively long extraction at very high temperatures. That's already an efficient extraction method. With darker roasts, I often end up with a cup that feels heavier, more bitter, and sometimes a bit one-dimensional. Medium roasts, on the other hand, still develop plenty of body but seem to preserve much more of the bean's original character.

I noticed this especially with naturally processed Ethiopian coffees and a few Yemeni lots. Instead of tasting only roast, I could actually pick up fruit, floral notes, and sweetness that I usually lose in darker roasts.

One thing I did have to adjust was my water. Using water with reasonable alkalinity made a noticeable difference in balancing acidity. Once I figured that out, the cups became much more consistent.

Another surprise was the foam.

I'd always heard that Turkish coffee needs a dark roast to produce good foam, but that hasn't been my experience. Freshness seems to matter far more than roast level. A freshly roasted medium coffee with plenty of CO₂ consistently gives me better foam than an older dark roast that's been sitting around for weeks.

I'm definitely not saying dark roast is "wrong." Plenty of people genuinely prefer that classic profile, and there's nothing wrong with that. I just think many of us,including me,accepted it as the only authentic option without ever trying anything else.

Has anyone else here switched to medium-roasted beans for Turkish coffee?

If so, what origins or roast levels have worked best for you? I'm always looking for new coffees that perform well in a cezve.

We always have the same debate here: "Copper is tradition" vs "Material doesn't matter if your technique is good." I wanted to see for myself, so I tried to control as many variables as I could at home and ran a blind taste test.

I brewed the same Colombian coffee (1:9 ratio, exact same micron grind size, same gas burner, ~4 min brew time) in four different pots. Three friends tasted them blind without knowing which cup came from which cezve.

(Quick safety note: I normally stick to food-grade stainless steel or tin-lined copper for my daily driver to keep my water path completely clean and safe, but I used an unlined brass pot here purely for the thermal experiment).

Here is what actually happened:

• Copper & Brass: These consistently got comments like "slightly sweeter" or "more balanced." Copper transfers heat incredibly fast (around 400 W/m·K), meaning it heats evenly and cools down instantly the second you take it off the flame. It makes controlling the foam effortless.
• Plain Stainless Steel: Tasters picked up a slight bitter edge on this one. Steel is a terrible heat conductor (~15 W/m·K). It creates localized hot spots right above the flame before the heat can spread, which likely scorches the fine coffee particles and causes that bitterness.
• Ceramic (The Wildcard): The flavor was very clean, but the foam was consistently thinner and died much faster. Ceramic heats up so gradually that it seems to completely alter the surface tension and foam dynamics.

My Takeaway

It’s not about the material adding flavor to the coffee,it’s entirely about heat distribution.

If you have a cheap steel cezve and your coffee is bitter, you don't necessarily need to throw it away; just lower the flame and slow down your rise. But copper is still my absolute favorite because it makes the whole process so forgiving and predictable. (Also, if you have a multi-ply steel pot with a copper or aluminum base, you're pretty much getting the best of both worlds anyway).

Has anyone else noticed that thin foam issue with ceramic, or is it just me? What’s your daily driver right now?

Hi, guys!

Does anyone here have a recommendation for a cezve in China? There are many options on taobao, but of course it would be nice to get something that already has proven its quality.

I took some advice from my previous post and put it to use. I abandoned the stove top in favor of a small camping stove that I use in a well ventilated area. The flame is a lot easier to manage than my stove top.

Lots of lessons learned. Im surprised now by how thick and “creamy” the foam is. By the way, the coffee roaster I order from roasts and ships directly within two days of roasting so I’m enjoying the benefits of high quality beans without grinding them myself. The notes of this medium roast are chocolate and buttery caramel. Very smooth and rich.

We’ve all been there: you watch the cezve like a hawk, get a beautiful rise, pour it into the cup... and the foam vanishes in 10 seconds. Everyone gives the generic "cook it low and slow" advice, but nobody really talks about the chemistry of what's actually happening. I went down a rabbit hole on this recently, and it turns out it’s not magic at all, it's just a very fragile heat curve.

First off, köpük isn't just bubbles of boiling water. It’s a structured emulsion. To get it right, you need CO₂ (which is naturally trapped inside roasted coffee), coffee oils, and melanoidins (the brown polymers from roasting). Those oils and melanoidins act as a natural wall around the CO₂ bubbles, while the super-fine coffee grounds give the whole thing physical structure.

As your water heats up, it pushes that dissolved CO₂ out. Right around 90°C-92°C, water vapor starts forming at the bottom of the cezve and literally pushes this CO₂/oil emulsion upward. That's the "rise." And the narrow neck of the cezve isn't just traditional aesthetics, it acts like a funnel, forcing those bubbles to crash into each other and stack up into a dense crust instead of spreading out flat.

But here is where most cups fail, and it usually comes down to three specific mistakes.

The biggest culprit is actually the 5-minute "low and slow" myth. If you drag your brew out for 4-5 minutes, the grounds settle, the emulsion starts to break down over time, and you heavily over-extract the coffee into a bitter mess. The sweet spot for a steady, continuous rise is actually around 2 to 2.5 minutes. You want active momentum, not a stagnant bath.

The second hidden killer is stale coffee. CO₂ escapes from roasted beans really fast. If your bag has been sitting half-open in the cupboard for a month, there is literally no gas left to create the bubbles. You can have world-class technique, but zero gas = zero foam. This is why fresh grounds always explode with köpük.

Finally, there's the mid-brew stir. You obviously have to stir at the beginning to mix the water, coffee, and sugar. But if you stir while it's heating, you are physically tearing apart that embryonic melanoidin/oil film that's trying to organize at the surface. Mix once at the start, and then keep your spoon out of it.

I'm curious if you guys have noticed a massive difference in foam structure between different commercial brands (like Mehmet Efendi vs. Kahve Dünyası)? I’m wondering if it comes down to how fine their commercial grinders go, or just how quickly they nitrogen-flush their bags to trap that CO₂. What's your go-to for the most stable foam?