High Street lift

The Tespresso

The number of outlets serving pricey speciality teas and coffees are increasing, but what if you could combine them and get a commercial double-hit? Markus Hastenpflug, a former agricultural engineer, based in Diepholz, near Bremen, believes he has cracked it.

Hastenpflug owns 60% of Keiko, a green tea producer in Japan, and already has a booming online retail business selling everything from tea grown under kabuse nets in Kagoshima – a region that is to green tea what Bordeaux is to red wine – to green tea chocolate. Deciding that the antioxidant-rich, powdered green tea, or matcha, wasn’t so different from ground coffee, in 2003 Hastenpflug set out to find a machine to make a perfect green tea espresso. This, he reasoned, would infuse the drink – possibly augmented by the foam of a latte – with the mystique of the barista, which would lead to bolder pricing and better returns.

The machine Hastenpflug eventually had specially made in Japan by Sanyo has an integral ceramic grinder to get the very fine powder from the tencha leaf and can create a crema, the foam that so excites espresso connoisseurs. Seven years later these machines are hissing and bubbling away in Keiko matcha bars in several German cities, including Hamburg and Heilbronn. On the cards are Frankfurt, Berlin, Munich and Cologne and an imminent international rollout is likely to begin with London.

“People don’t realise that matcha has 60mg of caffeine per 100ml, compared to 80mg for espresso and 20mg for traditionally brewed green tea,” says Hastenpflug. “What’s more, they don’t realise it has 1,200mg of vitamin C per 100ml where espresso has none.”