Kopi (Nanyang Coffee)

Kopi – the Malay word for coffee – is the everyday drink of the kopitiam, the traditional coffee shops of Singapore and Malaysia. Its distinctive flavour starts with the roast: Robusta beans are roasted very dark with sugar and margarine (and sometimes a little salt), which caramelises onto the beans and gives the coffee a deep, toasty, slightly buttery taste.

The ground coffee is placed in a long cloth filter, often called a “sock”, and hot water is poured through it into a tall pot. The coffee is stirred and poured back and forth to aerate it, then served in a thick china cup. By default “kopi” means coffee with sugar and sweetened condensed milk – strong, sweet and rich.

Every other version has its own code. Kopi-O is black with sugar, kopi-C comes with evaporated milk, peng means iced, kosong means no sugar, siew dai less sweet and gao extra strong. Singaporeans count dozens of combinations, and kopi makes up the large majority of coffee drunk in the city-state.

Kopi developed during the British colonial period in Malaya and Singapore. Robusta beans, which grew better in the region than Arabica, became the standard, and Chinese immigrants adapted coffee to local tastes with their dark sugar-and-margarine roast. The vocabulary of ordering is largely Hokkien, reflecting the many Hokkien-speaking immigrants from Fujian, while “Nanyang” – the Chinese name for Southeast Asia – gives the coffee its other name.

Hainanese immigrants played a central role. Arriving in large numbers from the 1870s, many worked as cooks and in service jobs, and from the 1920s to the 1950s they opened coffee shops of their own. Well-known names such as Killiney Kopitiam (with roots in a 1919 shop) and Ya Kun Kaya Toast (1926) were started by Hainanese immigrants.

The kopitiam survived hard times – during the Japanese Occupation many closed, and those that stayed open could serve kopi only without sugar or milk – and remains part of everyday life. Chains such as Ya Kun and Toast Box have taken kopi and kaya toast well beyond Singapore.