Helsinki Airport's new Johan & Nyström café offers several filter coffee blends, estate coffees, and espresso blends but also limited-edition specialities from small operations, with varying availability and quantities.
The café also carries a selection of raw cakes, sourdough breads, fresh croissants, and delicious local pastries, buns called ‘pulla’.
‘Our coffees come from our very own roastery. They are roasted by hand at a slow pace, then ground on-site just before we make and serve the coffee,’ explains Lari Salomaa, national manager for Johan & Nyström.
On top of the trend toward hand-brewed filter coffee
Though espresso-based coffee drinks remain popular everywhere in the world year after year, there is a growing group of filter-coffee enthusiasts, particularly in the Nordic region, Japan, and the US.
‘It is now especially trendy to opt for hand-brewed coffee – filter coffee made one cup at a time. And it’s not any old coffee. This is sourced from a specific estate in Africa or Latin America, growing only a single variety of Arabica,’ Salomaa tells us.
Very dark roasts are not favoured by these coffee aficionados; they prefer to taste the coffee itself, not the roast. They believe very dark roasting can mask lower quality of water or other materials, for example.
A refined Ethiopian or a chocolatey Colombian?
Coffee is a product of nature, so the taste of a given variety may depend slightly on the year. While variations in growing conditions affect the crop and the taste of the many varieties, the typical flavours characteristic of certain regions are still identifiable, according to Salomaa.
‘Some of our most popular products are the fresh, refined, and acidic Ethiopian or Kenyan coffees. Others are chocolatey, nutty, and sweet Colombian and Brazilian ones. You are welcome to taste them yourself!’ he says.
He adds that a sign of a good coffee is that it’s not bitter; that’s why it tastes good even without milk.
Helsinki Airport Johan & Nyström
Terminal 1
GATE 13
open daily from 4am to 8pm
Photos: Finavia, Johan&Nyström
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