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2016-09-26
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Phil Coffee Company is among cafés mentioned in Sprudge’s article “7 Good Cafes In Sukhumvit, Bangkok: The Sprudge Coffee Guide” which concentrated on the Ekkamai/Thonglor area a al Sheung Wan in Hong Kong. And the café seems to be well regarded for its green bean quality so much so that once I mentioned about this café, most Thai cafés told me that I should drop by to try varieties of quality green beans. So I did. Notice the entrance, it states very clear that there is no parking inside! An
And the café seems to be well regarded for its green bean quality so much so that once I mentioned about this café, most Thai cafés told me that I should drop by to try varieties of quality green beans. So I did.
Notice the entrance, it states very clear that there is no parking inside!
And you also need to walk a bit from the main street until you see a house that is Phil Coffee Company.
Inside, it is a typical Thai house to me which is quite dark to keep it cooler.
Here’s some price list of drip coffee. Steep?
And yes, there’s something apart from coffee to have here.
But I had limited time on that day so I opted for the basic and fast stuff, espresso.
This Urzo blend has a somewhat plain tasting note considering four coffee beans used i.e. Thai, Laos, Ethiopia and Brazil. Despite some semblance of components in the blend to other roasters, this blend was not just another full bodied and caramel thing to me like any other blends that were used at other places around. At least, the roast was on the light side and the good thing in that it’s not way too light.
House blend espresso
฿100
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I left the shop on that day wondering why people considered this place a source of good green just from drinking its house blend espresso. The thought continued to bother me so I bit the bullet and revisited this cafe for the second time. This visit changed my mind.
On my second visit to the shop, I opted for the drip coffee of the one Phil well-advertised coffee, this Costa Rica COE 2015 #3.
I didn’t put down any note this time as I was so excited about the drip method here.
A hand that touch the filter paper during the rinse of the filter!
And I had to rub my eyes to make sure whether this was the famous Scott Rao that jumped out of page 37 of Everything but Espresso book who brewed the coffee for me on that day when the barista stirred the coffee slurry during the drip process. And the magic begins?
Just want to repeat again that I’m writing this out of my memory as I was in awe and didn’t make any note. I remember that I got some stonefruit and the cup that was heavier in body than drip that didn’t use the slurry stirring like this.
I remembered back in the day when Everything but Espresso came out that we all tried to use this method for drip brewing and the resulting cups were big on body and less so on other tastes, a somewhat disappointment to us. It’s not like the good big body I have had from batch brew which is quite balance. This slurry stirring method that we tried in those days delivered a sort of over-extracted cups and the body tends to dominate other tasting notes much more than the batch brew and more than what I like.
This cup by Phil, however, is decent for this brew method; neither over nor under. But it suffered from the same issue I had with those slurry stirring cups ie the body was huge relative to other tastes and felt distracting, acting as a deterrent to other tasting notes in the cup. This is not a bad cup just to be sure; it is drinkable. While it is not what I like for my drip coffee, it is still an interesting cup of coffee.
Coffee on sales on that day and accessories on sales on that day.
To continue with the theme of quality green bean I opted for single origin espresso. Yes, this cup helped redeem good opinions of quality green here. And I admire shops that have guts to brew Kenya as espresso.
The single origin Kenyan was quite sweet and all I remembered is blackberry in the cup. The pull was decent. Among third wave peers that I tried in Bangkok, the barista here knew his coffee well and delivered a much better cup than a single origin espresso I had at Roots.
Kenya Riakiberru Single Origin Espresso
฿120
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I talked to barista, saying that it’s sweet n blackberry but other tasting notes were quite subdued. The barista suggested me to add some water to the shot! Normally, I wouldn’t buy this method as my belief is that the taste was pretty much dictated after you finished the pull and adding water won’t give much help to more taste ie if it had those tastes, it already should show and nothing much you can do to improve it. However, I had to admit this barista knew what he is doing and those tasting note, be it lime, chocolate, brown sugar etc. were much clearer this way. Though this method comes at the expense of body which makes the cup now tastes closer to concentrated drip than espresso. You can’t win ‘em all!
Had I not come to Phil for the second time and only depended on Phil’s house blend espresso as a representation for what the shop is, I would have missed the reason why people around town admires the green bean quality here.
Other Info. :
Try Single Origin and expensive beans that is the top of Phil's recommended list
(The above review is the personal opinion of a user which does not represent OpenRice's point of view.)
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