Up an a little bit ambitious hill just a block off the main strip in Gangnam lies a cafe that doesn’t bother to have an English name and is a bit tricky to find: caffe 꽃을피우고 (“caffe the flower that blooms and…”).

Naver maps link: Caffe

Google maps: 

The cafe looks like it was opened a fairly long time ago and nothing much has happened since then. You could call it retro I guess.

The menu for hand drip coffee is fairly extensive with options from all corners of the world:

I chose Sidamo. In terms of coffee preparation it was a process heavily guided by intuition/experience. Beans were weighed, but no timer or scale for the water. Also, it was less a dripping, and much more steeping. The goal seemed to have been to ensure a consistently high water level throughout the process. Not my favorite way of doing it.

The result? Not enough to compensate for the lack of precision. The coffee didn’t really have any aromas, especially no sweet or floral ones that I had hoped for.

Of course, a lot of things may have contributed to my impression, but it will be some time until I hike up that hill again.