How to Escape Coffee: A Degustation Workshop Exploring Alternatives Through Heritage and Ecology

Coffee is such a normal part of our day that we rarely stop to think about what sits behind the cup.

Where does it come from? Why did coffee become our default morning drink? What are the ecological and economic consequences of producing it thousands of kilometres away? And perhaps the most interesting question for us: if coffee disappeared tomorrow, what would we drink instead?

How to Escape Coffee is a tasting workshop and an ongoing Fermenthings experiment around those questions.

We'll start with coffee itself, looking at its history, colonial legacy and the global system that developed around it. We'll also talk about what climate change means for coffee production today and why looking for alternatives is becoming increasingly relevant.

But then we start drinking.

Together we'll taste ingredients that have historically been used as coffee alternatives, alongside some of the experiments we've been developing ourselves: chicory, roasted barley, acorns, dandelion root, grains, legumes and fermented ingredients. Some are surprisingly close to coffee, others take us somewhere completely different.

We'll brew them using familiar techniques such as the V60, moka pot, AeroPress and French press, exploring what happens when we apply the language and techniques of specialty coffee to ingredients growing much closer to home.

The idea isn't to find the new coffee. It's to understand what we're actually looking for when we drink one. Is it bitterness? Roasted aromas? Body? Caffeine? The ritual of preparing something warm in the morning?

Every edition also feeds back into our Escaping Coffee Lab, where we continue experimenting with ingredients, roasting, fermentation and brewing methods. So don't expect all the answers. This workshop is very much part of the research.

Come taste, compare, discuss and perhaps leave with a few new ideas for your morning cup.

Practical information

Duration: approximately 2 hours
Price: €30 per person
Location: Fermenthings @ Be-Here, Rue Dieudonné Lefèvre 4, 1020 Laeken, Brussels
Languages: English, with French or Dutch translation whenever needed

No coffee expertise is required. Curiosity helps.