Instant coffee and commercial coffee are no longer enough to satisfy the petty bourgeois city of Shanghai, and independent cafes full of personality have emerged. Independent cafes have unique elements that cannot be replicated in chain stores, such as personalized decoration, personalized baristas, and personalized specialty coffee. In chain coffee stores, you will hardly see baristas chatting with customers, while in independent cafes, all the conversation revolves around coffee.

The Ashida Coffee Workshop is the most personalized independent café in Shanghai. The reservation system is implemented, the store is closed irregularly, the door is closed during the business period, there is no menu, and only hand is done. It is such a shop that makes specialty coffee enthusiasts in Shanghai and even the whole country obsessed. Ashida Coffee was founded in 2011 as a retail outlet for home-roasted coffee beans and simple coffee classes, until 2014 when it opened a store called "Ashida Coffee Workshop".

The Ashida Coffee Workshop is run by Hideo Nakajima, a barista from Japan, and his wife. The barista comes from the construction industry and worked as a barista at a café in Shanghai called ALT before starting his own business. His pour-over is regarded as a ritual performance by coffee lovers, and his coffee classes are very popular with a steady stream of admirers. The Ashida family only serves pour-over coffee, which is brewed in Matsuya style, one of the three major schools of Japanese pour-over, and the Ashida family is one of only two cafes in Shanghai that can be drunk with this brewing method.

Here you can find specialty coffee beans from all over the world, and the green beans are supplied by the world-renowned Tim company. At the same time, the Ashida family often buys top-quality coffee beans, especially micro-batch beans, which are sold out at the store. The coffee beans of the Ashida family are all roasted in-house, and the roasting degree continues the best flavor of the coffee beans. In order to maintain the freshness of cooked beans, a reservation is required at the time of purchase, and the store roasts them according to the needs. Coffee beans are also ground in the store, and the thickness of the coffee powder can be selected according to the brewing equipment. It should be reminded that the flavor preservation time of coffee after grinding into powder is greatly reduced, and it is recommended to brew it within a week.

Located in a Shikumen building along West Nanjing Road, the Ashida Coffee Workshop retains the charm of an old Shanghai courtyard with a Japanese-style log design. The store is composed of the east and west wings and the hall and guest rooms, the west wing is used for baking studios, the east wing is used for entertaining customers, and the hall and guest rooms are used as art display areas, and many independent design brands at home and abroad have displayed their works here.

*Encyclopedia of knowledge

What is Specialty Coffee?

The concept of specialty coffee was introduced in 1974 by Erna Knustsen, founder of the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA). Specialty coffee associations around the world have different definitions of specialty coffee, but the unanimous goal is to meet high standards for growing, beaning, roasting, and brewing to be a specialty coffee. If we use the scoring system developed by the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) as a reference, specialty coffee is at the top of the pyramid, and the score is required to be above 80 points.

Specialty coffee in China started late, and the industry generally believes that it started in 2012.