İzmir's Coffee Festival pays homage to ancient port where coffee imports began

Global coffee experts often claim that millennials are the ones pushing up the coffee consumption - that is why countries with young populations, like Turkey, show a higher rate of annual increase in coffee consumed.
"I believe that coffee culture will take over tea culture in the next five years," Şahin Aydoğan, the general coordinator of the İzmir Coffee Festival, which ran from Oct. 14 to 16, told the Hürriyet Daily News.  "Turkish youth are very much into coffee, from the traditional Turkish coffee to the more artisanal third wave."

A glance at the three-day festival, where İzmirian and non-İzmirian baristas, coffee equipment producers, coffee chains and degustators rub elbows, seems to confirm the belief: Apart from a few 40-year-olds clearly there to sell coffee equipment, most everyone is below 30, scrubby-faced and seem to be on their third cup of coffee - and it is only mid-morning.

The İzmirian youth in shorts and summer dresses, enjoying the Indian summer of 25 degrees, enjoy their picks among the brands that are not yet present in the coastal town, such as Ministry of Coffee or Coffee Sapiens and the local brands. In one corner, the French patisserie Leone, which the owners named after their French mother, sell croissants and tarts. Youthful voices of baristas are heard over each other, airing questions that are unintelligible to the untrained ear: "Chemex or Siphon?" "How would you like your latte art?" 

The Coffee Festival İzmir, with its ambitious slogan of "The smell of coffee, the smell of the sea" is a first in this port city, where new "third-generation coffee shops" mushroom every month. With catchy names in English and Italian, often with a play of words such as Baristocrat, Awake or Coffeenary, they proudly display...