A sweetness rising from the cup before I could name it. Bitterness, yes, but layered with something bright and dense — a concentrated fruitiness that called to mind several fruits at once, none of them quite right, all of them close.
I had asked for something fruity. The Taiwanese coffee that Kawano-san brewed for me did not just answer the request. It dismantled everything I thought I knew about what "fruity" meant in coffee.
Kawano Yuma runs LIGHT UP COFFEE, a specialty roaster and cafe in Tokyo. We have been going there for years — it is one of those places where the coffee itself does the talking, and the people behind the counter seem genuinely unable to stop thinking about it. When we sat down to talk, the conversation covered everything a single bean goes through, from the soil it grows in to the cup it ends up in.
I have long felt that coffee is the closest thing to tea. Not as a flavor comparison — as a structural one. Both begin with a cultivated plant. Both require processing before they become drinkable. Variety, origin, and method shape the final cup in ways that can feel limitless. And in both, the act of brewing introduces yet another set of variables — temperature, timing, the vessel itself — so that what you actually taste is the sum of dozens of decisions made by people you may never meet.
That overlap is what brought us to Kawano-san's table. The parallels, the divergences, the places where tea and coffee think differently about the same problem. This is the first half of that conversation.
From cultivation to cup. What LIGHT UP COFFEE thinks about.
Q: Thank you for making time today. I wanted to start by asking — you tried some of our teas recently. What did you think, honestly?
One thing that surprised me was how much better the single-serve portions were than I expected. As an experience, I mean. I do not really know how many grams of tea to use, so being able to just open a packet and go was a relief.
The recipe card helped, too. I know tea changes with temperature, but I would not know what temperature suits which leaf. Having the card say "brew this way to bring out these characteristics" — that made a real difference for me. And the tea itself was good. Really, genuinely good.
Q: I am so glad to hear that. When I first drank your Taiwanese coffee at LIGHT UP, it completely rearranged my idea of what coffee could be. Did we manage to do the same for your idea of tea?
What I found interesting was the character difference between each tea. If you buy a hundred grams of one kind, you drink it every day, and by the time you finish it, you have no frame of reference. You cannot tell what makes it different from anything else.
Q: Right — you need the comparison to perceive the contrast.
Exactly. Because I was drinking several kinds in a short window, I could feel it — this one is more refreshing, this one has a milky quality. I started to understand the range of what tea can be, and where my own preferences sit. That was new for me.
Q: By the way, what did you brew it with?
A French press.
— We have never actually tried that with our teas.
Immersion and percolation. Choosing the method by working backward.
Q: With tea, the standard method is a kyusu — essentially immersion brewing. But you can also brew tea through a paper drip, much like coffee. Coffee has so many extraction methods and tools. Which one does LIGHT UP use?
Hand drip. Everything.
Q: Is there a reason?
Because it tastes the best. That is the whole reason.
Immersion does not involve technique. The only variable is time, and the right time is four minutes — that is settled. There is no room for a barista's intent, no way to shape the bean's character through the act of brewing.
Which is actually a strength, for certain people. If someone is just starting out with coffee and feels overwhelmed by how much the brewing method affects flavor — use a French press. Four minutes. It will taste good every time. You will not have to wonder whether the problem is you.
— I remember that feeling from my early days with tea. Wondering whether a cup tasted flat because of the leaf or because of something I did wrong.
Everyone stumbles there. You think maybe your technique is off, but sometimes the bean just does not suit you, and that is why the cup falls flat. A French press makes that distinction clear — if it still does not taste right, the bean is the variable, not your hands.
Q: So LIGHT UP chose hand drip specifically to bring out something more personal — a barista's own reading of the bean?
There are two reasons, actually. The first is that drip lets you inject human intent.
A lot of coffee shops work from a fixed recipe — this many grams, this much water, poured over this many minutes. And honestly, is that not a little boring? At that point, a machine could do it.
The most enjoyable part of brewing coffee, for me, is grasping what makes a particular bean good. This one has a beautiful fruit quality. This one has a transparency to it. Once you find that, you want to amplify it.
With immersion, everything comes out. With drip, you can pull more of this part and hold back that part. Technique lets you reduce the negatives and bring the positives forward. The bean's character, refined through a person's hands — that is what drip offers.
And at LIGHT UP, we take it further. We do not fix a recipe. Each barista decides which positive quality to foreground. One might lean toward sweetness, another toward brightness. That individual intent, reflected in the cup — that is the first reason.
— I see.
The second reason is extraction efficiency. Drip makes it easier to draw out everything the bean has to give.
The difference between immersion and drip comes down to whether fresh water is constantly passing through. During extraction, compounds dissolve into the water's available capacity. The more unused capacity, the more compounds come out. In immersion, the water fills up with dissolved material early on — after that, there is less room for anything new.
With drip, every new pour brings water at zero concentration. The compounds keep releasing into it. The later pours, in particular, draw out sweetness — and that sweetness is what gives the cup a long, balanced finish. For controlling extraction rate, drip is simply better suited.
This matters most with light roasts. You need to extract fully, and while a French press can get there, drip makes it easier to shape the result with your own hands.
— That is fascinating. Tea brewing is almost entirely immersion — the kyusu is a steeping vessel. The idea of using percolation to shape extraction feels genuinely foreign. I want to dig into both of those points, but —
Wait. There was a third reason.
— Go on.
Coffee contains more oil than most beverages. The third reason is that we want to cut that oil for a cleaner cup.
Q: Because the paper filter absorbs it?
Right. We do not use metal filters at all. One of the advantages of drip is that you can use paper.
Q: Tea has texture, too — oils that change how the tongue perceives flavor. A slight viscosity makes umami and sweetness register more strongly. So the goal is to strip that away — to remove the lingering coating?
There is a concept in coffee quality evaluation called "clean cup." It means clarity — transparency. The highest-scoring coffees are on the same level as water. You cannot detect any impure or muddled flavors.
Coffee reveals its individuality through clarity. If the cup is not clean, differences between beans become hard to perceive. That is why clarity matters so much — it is the condition that allows you to actually taste what a bean is.
A French press is not necessarily unclear. But paper filtration takes it further. That is another reason we use it.
— Hearing all of this, what comes through clearly is how much LIGHT UP values the individuality of each bean. Even if the approach is personal — even if two baristas produce slightly different cups — the underlying premise is always the same: maximize what that specific bean can express.
Pursuing character. How LIGHT UP COFFEE chooses its beans.
Q: I wanted to ask about how you select beans. We are essentially a tea select shop — we curate from producers we trust. What criteria do you use?
The first is seasonality.
Coffee has a freshness window. In its green state, roughly one year from harvest is the standard. There is a concept of vintage, aging beans intentionally, but that is not how we think about flavor.
Coffee is an agricultural product, like vegetables. You enjoy the harvest of this year while it is this year's. Next year's crop you enjoy next year. Drink what arrived fresh, while it is still fresh. That rhythm feels right to us.
The second is avoiding character overlap.
This is about making the choice easier for the customer. When someone walks in and we ask, "Costa Rica, Ethiopia, or Kenya?" — most people are going to say, "Just give me the good one."
And of course they will. Only someone who already drinks a lot of coffee can answer that question meaningfully.
— I understand. For the customer to choose, they need a frame of reference they do not yet have.
Exactly. So we make sure no two beans on the shelf have a similar character. The spread has to be wide enough that anyone can feel it — this one is the brightest, this one is the sweetest, this one is the most fruit-forward. End to end.
At the Kichijoji shop, we have a three-cup tasting set. For first-time visitors, I recommend starting there. Once they find a direction they like, they can come back and order a single drip with more confidence.
It is only through tasting side by side that people grasp how different coffees can actually be.
We recently started writing flavor descriptors on the cards — JUICY, FLORAL, things like that. We used to list the producer and the origin, but I realized at some point that from the customer's perspective, those details meant almost nothing.
The third criterion is taste — or more precisely, what we mean by "good."
The trouble is that "good" is subjective. Not everyone finds the same coffee delicious. So this criterion is really about LIGHT UP's own concept — what kind of deliciousness are we pursuing?
For us, it is flavor that reminds you of fruit. Coffee that does not taste the way you expect coffee to taste. Something with a distinctive, almost startling fruitiness — the kind that makes you pause and rethink the category.
Q: We tend toward a similar instinct with tea. We gravitate toward leaves with a pronounced personality — something that sticks out — rather than anything safe or flat. You mentioned fruitiness. Where does that quality actually come from in coffee?
Cultivar and fermentation. The cultivar determines the chemical profile of the bean. Fermentation — specifically, which microorganisms are involved — transforms it.
Lately we have been experimenting. Lactic acid bacteria. Cider yeast. Champagne yeast. The cider yeast produced something beautiful, but in general, I think the most natural approach is letting the indigenous microbes do the work.
— I recently read a book on fermentation — Hiraku Ogura's "Fermentation Cultural Anthropology."
I have heard of it, yes.
— What struck me was how deeply local microorganisms are. Different countries, different farms, different processing rooms — each harbors its own microbial community. Even cleaning a workspace can shift the balance enough to change flavor. There is something compelling about that: the case for tradition is not nostalgia, it is biology. The fermentation step is literally making a coffee that can only exist in that place. I wonder if that is part of why origin has become such a focus.
If you extend that thought — yes, more people are paying attention to origin now. But most consumers still judge coffee by roast level. Light or dark. That is their mental model for flavor.
What I believe, though, is that the real attention belongs at the farm. The farm is the only place where the raw material is created.
Roasting produces fruity aromatics through chemical reactions, that is true. But roasting takes a 1 and turns it into a 3 or a 5. The farmer is the one who makes the 0 into a 1. That, to me, is the most significant work in the entire chain.
— Among all the stages — cultivation, processing, roasting, extraction — LIGHT UP points its light at the farm.
The farm. Always.