From opulent beginnings to one of the most familiar items to billions of coffee consumers worldwide, the story of the zarf in some ways echoes the story and history of coffee.
Early coffee:
As coffee spread from Africa to the middle east new customs, rituals and solutions to old problems emerged.
We don’t truly know when coffee arrived in (what is now the country of) Turkey but we do know that it was served in porcelain or glass containers. This represented a challenge for coffee drinkers since both glass and porcelain conduct heat well. And so, the zarf was born to protect the hands when drinking from a hot container.
The zarf:
A zarf is typically an ornate metal casing to be placed around the container that holds the coffee, to protect the hands from heat during drinking. And lo, the problem of painfully hot coffee fingers was solved. Zarfs also solved a stability issue by virtue of their outurned bases and one of ornate design to elevate coffee’s ritualized drinking elements.
In the early stages of coffee’s spread across the world it was certainly not available to all and often kept to the upper classes. Upon coffee’s arrival in Turkey the sultans and palace staff were the first it reached and then brewed in a cezve (or ibrik). In fact, there was a special class of palace staff, called the Baltadji, whose job it was to make coffee for the elite.
In its earliest days coffee was certainly a status symbol and the rituals, traditions and accoutrements connected with coffee-making conveyed this. The zarf, and its ornateness, therefore became an object of status too.
Despite its ornate trappings the zarf did solve a real life problem and one that we still encounter today. A drink that is best brewed at around 200f, and served soon after, is hot and too hot to hold in a conductive container.
And so, the zarf’s protective qualities and its solution of a real world problem were the precursor of the Russian podstakannik, which is a similar device used for drinking tea. More notably (perhaps) they were also the precursor for that most familiar of items, the modern coffee cup sleeve.
The coffee sleeve:
The coffee cup sleeve which was invented in 1991 by Jay Sorensen under the name ‘java jacket’. The drive to create a solution for the ‘hot fingers’ problem came in 1989 when he was pulling out of a coffee shop drive-through and spilled his coffee because it was too hot to hold.
In 1992 a now famous lawsuit, Liebeck vs McDonald’s Restaurants, established the dangers of hot coffee when 79 year-old Stella Liebeck suffered 3rd degree burns from spilling hot coffee on herself that she had just purchased from McDonald’s. Coffee sellers took notice. Not only was the coffee sleeve good for consumers it was also better for business. And with demand being driven on both sides the path to broad adoption was clear.
Sorensen’s wisely patented the Java Jacket but it has still gone on to inspire many copycat designs including Starbucks who created, and patented, their own solution soon after. And they’ve kept innovating since to meet consumer expectations around environmental responsibility.
Sorensen still sells his sleeves, billions of them in fact, and still under the name Java Jacket. And such is the cultural ubiquity of Sorensen’s invention that MOMA (Museum of Modern Art) recognized the Java Jacket in 2005 with its own placement at the museum. Thus elevating it alongside Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol.
Conclusion:
Zarf may seem like a forgotten term for an ancient item but it’s still very much used today interchangeably with coffee cup sleeve (really, try googling it) and so the line runs right through 500+ years of history. It’s still with us and still solving that same problem, saving us from all manner of pain when a cup of delicious, award winning coffee makes our fingers too hot to hold it.
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Photo credit (top image) to Jorge Cancela
