We`ve come a long way from when coffee was the stuff known as koffie, brewed in a chuckling aluminium percolator, with brown liquid boiling inside the little glass dome on the lid. It used a coarse ground “S`effrican” blend of cheap and cheerful robusta with a pinch of chicory, roasted till the beans resembled charcoal with a caffeine kick sufficient to induce premature labour in pregnant women. Often drunk straight from the saucer, the residual was mopped up by the ubiquitous Oumas, the buttermilk rusks that constitute an entire food group.

For the die-hard aficionado, there is no such thing as generic coffee. Balzac used to walk the streets of Paris from importer to importer, biting through samples of green beans in each shop before he concocted his own strong blend that fuelled his late-night literary imagination. Today, his counterparts comb Manhattan and the Internet for exotic beans at exorbitant prices. The true addict will track down such “winey-flavoured” gems as Sulawesi Peaberry or Affar at a mere R400 per kilo.