KL – Bean Thinking

Ditto, KL — A sign above the five-foot-way alerts you to the cafe above. “Ditto” in Bukit Damansara, KL.

“Ditto” it turns out can represent a number of meanings. No longer merely a shorthand for saying ‘the same thing’, it is now a Pokemon character and a fantastically chilled cafe on the first floor of a row of shops on Jalan Kasah in Kuala Lumpur. Ditto, the cafe, moved to the Damansara site in October 2022 having previously been a pop-up style cafe in Petaling Jaya.

A small sign hanging from the ceiling of the ‘5 foot way’ advertises that you can find the cafe up a set of unassuming looking stairs between two shops. Climbing the stairs, you do not expect the door at the top to open into such a quiet, ambient and welcoming space. Opening the door to the air conditioned cafe, the counter is diagonally left. A couple of circular tables are on your immediate left while a table full of coffee beans and coffee related books lies to your right. We first arrived very shortly after the cafe opened at 10am and so we had the place to ourselves. The coffee menu is extensive. Coffees from roasters around the world are available to try either as espresso based drinks or V60. Obviously I went for the V60.

interior cafe, Ditto, KL — Inside Ditto. Potted plants are dotted around the inside of the cafe while you could also choose to sit at a seat looking out of the window.

The first coffee I tried was a Colombian from Netherlands based roaster Manhattan Coffee Roasters. Very well made and interesting as a coffee, I was convinced that this was somewhere I could enjoy a geisha on my second visit. Almost tea-like, this geisha cup was a bit subtle for me although I could appreciate the different flavour notes coming out. Other drinks were also available (Kombucha, chocolate based drinks etc), though the focus is very much on the coffee. With such an extensive coffee menu, there are many more coffees than I would be able to sample before returning to London. It’s definitely a place that you can return to again and again while still finding something new.

The coffee arrived in a jug together with a couple of cups and a card reminding me of the tasting notes of the coffee I had chosen (though the print was too small for me to be able to read without glasses!). The jug showed evidence of condensation around the rim reminiscent of the physics of dew and the greenhouse effect. Physics was apparent too in the title of a book on display with the retail coffee beans: “The physics of filter coffee”. Flicking through the book, it was clear that this was a very comprehensive guide to the physics of how to brew good coffee. Should this go on the Christmas book wish-list? Elsewhere books and magazines offered plenty to think about on issues about the architecture of cafes or the types of coffee to be found around the world.

Table that resembles the surface of Jupiter — One of the circular marble tables in Ditto. The way the rock has formed suggests a view of the planet Jupiter. An overhead light has formed a triangle reflected from the table’s surface.

This is definitely a space in which you can sit, enjoy a well made coffee and contemplate whatever thought train your mind decides to take you on. And yet, I would defy anyone to look at the circular table and not think “Jupiter”.

The tables are made of marble, the layers that made the first set of sedimentary rock (that is the basis of the metamorphic marble) are clearly visible as horizontal lines cutting through the entire circle of the table. They are the stripes of Jupiter. The colour too is similar to the images that we have seen either from telescopes or from the satellites that have flown by Jupiter since Pioneer 10 first flew by in 1973. Looking at the coffee on the table, we could find ourselves echoing the quote from one of the scientists involved in the latest fly-by probe (called “Juno”) describing the “incredibly beautiful” planet as “…an artist’s palette… almost like a van Gogh painting.”

We have been aware of the weather patterns that form these stripes, and in particular the “Great Red Spot” for hundreds of years. Yet it turns out that we still have a lot to learn about them. For example, the clouds in the band at the equator are moving eastwards, the stripes immediately north or south of those are moving westwards and then the wind pattern changes again with the latitude, eastward and westward as each stripe is formed. Then, every 4-9 years, depending on the latitude, the colours of the stripes change, a change that can be associated with brief but disruptive changes to the weather patterns. Shape shifting rather like the Pokemon character “Ditto” that is the inspiration for the name of the cafe.

Cassini portrait of Jupiter, copyright with NASA — Not a table! A view of the planet Jupiter taken by the Cassini mission in 2000. Photograph shared according to NASA image use policy.

Recent results from the Juno mission have revealed one of the things that could be underlying this shifting weather pattern: oscillations in the planet’s magnetic field. Juno, which has been measuring the magnetic field of Jupiter since it first started orbiting it in 2016 has revealed that the magnetic field strength is oscillating on a similar time scale to the changing patterns observed in the weather. Could this somehow be driving the weather that we see? Juno has also shown clearly a new feature in the magnetic field where the field lines are particularly intense, called the “Great Blue Spot”, this feature too may be oscillating spatially over the surface of the planet rather than rotating around it as the Great Red Spot seems to do.

Juno, the satellite, was named after Juno the Roman goddess who is the female counterpart of the Roman god Jupiter. Considered in some ways to be patron of women, there seems another link here to this women-run cafe. We may be tempted to think that we have fully explored this physics connection that has looped back to the space in which we are enjoying our drink. But there is one more connection between Jupiter and this cafe. The first probe to fly by Jupiter was Pioneer 10 in 1973. It was then that we first saw images of this planet close up. The first time we saw these stripes in such detail. The satellite was launched by NASA in 1972, the same year that this area of KL was being developed. Perhaps you could say 1972 was the same year this area of KL was ‘launched’. There truly are links and connections wherever we care to find them. When we slow down with our coffee and contemplate our surroundings while open to going on a thought-journey, we never know where we may end up.

Ditto Speciality Coffee Bar is at 128A Jalan Kasah, Bukit Damansara, 50490, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Seeing the trees for the wood at OJO Coffee, Bangsar, KL

coffees on display at OJO — OJO Coffee, Bangsar, Kuala Lumpur

It is very easy to sit for a long time watching the people and the surroundings at OJO Coffee in Bangsar, Kuala Lumpur. Initially I had thought that this medium-sized café with an impressive number of power points dotted around it was an independent. However similarities with CoffeaCoffee around the corner and a couple of other clues (CoffeaCoffee t-shirts) suggest that it is actually part of the CoffeaCoffee chain, something that was confirmed when I asked the barista. However, the standard of coffee in this chain should prompt some of the smaller independents to up their game a bit (and certainly all of the UK based chains). Not content with just serving the typical coffees of ‘latte’, ‘cappuccino’ etc. (which are made using their own blend), OJO’s additionally serves about 15 types of single origin coffee made with your choice of method (Hario V60, Aeropress or French press). For a while this summer I became a bit of a regular at OJO and so I would particularly recommend the Indonesian Sumatran prepared by V60, but with so many coffees to choose from (from the relatively local Indonesians to South American coffees from much further afield) there is plenty to try at this café.

wooden mosaic — The wall made of wood at OJO

The interior of OJOs is decorated with many types of wood. Different cuts of wood are made into a sort of wood mosaic on the wall while the tables are made using several types of wood so as to give a symbolism about the Sun that is a type of motif of the café. Much of the floor is wood too and so this got me thinking about the rainforests in this country. Malaysia has a rich variety of wildlife and forest, it is home to the Orangutan as well as many other species. Teak trees that can be used for more expensive furniture grow along the roadside. Much of this timber can be obtained sustainably and in a way that respects the rainforest and I am certainly not suggesting that the wood in OJOs was anything but sustainable. However, perhaps inevitably, there are many pressures on these invaluable forests. Some of these pressures have, in the recent past, resulted in significant deforestation. One such pressure is that of palm oil.

Palm oil is a massively useful commodity. It is now used in food products from margarine to biscuits to raisins (surprising but true, check the ingredients list of a packet of raisins) and non-food products such as soaps. It is literally everywhere. Both Malaysia and its neighbour, Indonesia, have profited enormously from growing and exporting palm oil. Unfortunately, at times the rainforest is cleared to make way for the palm oil plantations. As it is easier to burn felled trees to clear the land rather than to painstakingly pull the roots up by hand, the cleared forest is burned. But the ground is not any ordinary soil, the ground is often peat based which means that the fires on the surface penetrate deep below the ground and produce phenomenal amounts of smoke.

If at this point you were wondering where the ‘physics’ bit of this café-physics review is, I assure you it is coming. It is indeed linked to this environmental story and to OJOs, please keep with me.

Each year, parts of Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia are enveloped by a haze produced by this burning peat land (It made the BBC in 2013 when it was particularly bad, but some haze is present for a few weeks every year). Haze has the appearance of thick fog but smells of smoke. At times, visibility can be reduced such that the tops of nearby tall buildings are obscured. Each time land needs clearing for new palm oil plantations, this smoke is produced. The haze can be reduced by local weather patterns but on many days, the haze is cleared by the torrential rains that can occur in this part of the world.

the haze is coming in — L-R: The haze comes in over part of KL in 2013 (series of 3 pictures)

It is commonly said that ‘rain clears the air’ but this is not completely true. It is not the raindrops themselves that somehow wash the air free of the dust of the haze, it is the vortices that form behind them*. Just as a spoon dragged through coffee produces vortices behind it, so a raindrop falling through the air forms vortices in its wake. The size of these vortices will depend on the size of the drop and the speed at which it falls through the air; a tea spoon and a dessert spoon pulled at different speeds through the coffee similarly produce different forms of vortex. So the amount of dust that is ‘sucked in’ and falls to the ground will depend on the type of rain that falls. Perhaps if you are in Malaysia, Singapore or Indonesia when this haze is present, you could make a study of which sort of rain clears the air most effectively. I have an idea but not the evidence to see if the idea is correct, it would be interesting to know what you think.

As I left OJO one afternoon, the rain had started to come down. The rain, or at least the vortices behind the raindrops, cleared some of the haze that had been around earlier. It is a temporary solution to a longstanding problem. A more long lasting solution may be to start (or continue) asking manufacturers of those biscuits you are eating: just how sustainable is the palm oil they are using?

OJO is at No 23, Jalan Telawi 3, KL

* JR Saylor and BK Jones, Physics of Fluids, 17, 031706 (2005)