The Café Dispatch #10
When analog is an exercise to have fun, the American coffee drink I'd try and what I’m getting delivered home to have better coffee
Welcome to the Café Dispatch, a weekly letter about interesting café trends across the globe. If you enjoy it, please feel free to share it, and don’t forget to grab your favourite cup of coffee ☕️
We’re not done with the analog trend. In fact, I’d argue we’re just getting started, and there’s a dire need for spaces that embrace it fully, spaces that show a generation raised on iPads what our millennial (and GenX) world used to look like.
I came across CASSE Coffee in Tokyo while reading up my daily coffee newsfeed (yes, the irony of discovering analog culture through a screen isn’t lost on me), and it’s fascinating to think that the logical evolution of vinyl cafés is... cassette cafés.
For my fellow millennials, can you even recall that experience? I think it belongs to generations a little older than mine, but I do remember getting a discman, I absolutely loved it, but cassettes were reserved for our big stereo at home. And yes, I definitely created playlists on CDs for my friends…
I long for those days sometimes. The ones where you’d mindfully put together a list of songs and then engrave them onto a CD, and the time it consumed to go through that entire ritual, that’s what we’ve lost by living in such a fast-paced world where everything happens at the tip of our fingers.
What CASSE Coffee is doing (and what the broader analog movement represents) is treating friction as a benefit, not a flaw or feature. According to TrendWatching’s recent analysis, the café taps into five fundamental human needs that streaming culture can’t satisfy: slowness, tactile reality, human curation over algorithms, borrowed nostalgia for a simpler time, and ambient community without social exhaustion.
And the data showed that Japan’s domestic cassette production turned upward in 2023 for the first time in 24 years. Gen Z is gravitating toward formats that demand deliberate interaction, and pop culture is reframing cassettes as symbolic objects rather than outdated tech.
I even came across this awesome website to create J-Card generators - come on!
Though I own an espresso machine, I often dismiss the multitude of coffee drinks you can create at home to elevate your coffee experience. But I must say, since seeing this absolutely delightful coffee drink on my feed recently, I feel inspired.
Obviously, I had to hunt down the name of the coffee shop itself to see what kind of place this was, and I must say Prince Coffee looks like the kind of café I want to hang out at for hours - sunlight, big spaces and beautifully curated shelves.
Prince was founded in 2016 by Katie Prinsen. She brought the specialty coffee shop and natural wine bar combo to Portland and I really like that because it creates a completely different vibe, and kind of community, where people can not only come for great coffee but also wine and hang out day and night. It makes business sense (!!)
Coming back to that drink, it made me reflect - now that I no longer have Instagram, (I took the leap and deleted my entire account in January), that this isn’t just about pretty drinks for Instagram (though shareability matters). It’s about cafés finally understanding that when you’re sitting in a space that feels intentionally designed by someone who genuinely cares, your drink can’t feel like an afterthought.
The spaces that get this right aren’t just serving coffee - though a good batch brew with coffee roasters that match your vibe is already awesome, they also have a plan for their soft drinks and in Prince’s example, for their wine list.
What I’ll be ordering: The Peanut Brittle Latte of course!
A tiny Espresso Machine ideal if your kitchen doesn’t have much counter space
Ineffable Coffee offers a fun tasting box where you get to pick 7 different origins - and though I’m nearly off to Paris, it is on my list for this fall when I’ll return to Spain
These flat white cups for home when I’m hosting coffee and cake for my friends (or neighbours)
peanut brittle latte checks a lot of boxes for me- yum!
Back in the day-One of my skills was making good mix tapes and cd's. Plus I love the idea of slowness