The house
Twenty-two coffees a year
Coffee grew wild in one forest in Ethiopia before anyone owned it.
Everything that happened next, it caused.
What the cup did
- Around 1450
- Sufis in Yemen drank it to stay awake through night prayers. The first drink taken for what it does to the mind.
- 1511
- The governor of Mecca banned it. Cairo overruled him within the year.
- 1554
- Istanbul opened its first coffeehouses. In 1633 the Sultan closed them — not for the drink, for the conversations.
- 1652
- London got its first. Within fifty years there were hundreds, and the English called them penny universities: a penny for the cup, the argument for free.
- 1675
- Charles II tried to shut them down. He withdrew the order in eleven days.
- 1683
- The Ottoman army left Vienna, and — the story goes — left its coffee behind. The city has been drinking it ever since.
- 1686
- Edward Lloyd opened a coffeehouse for shipowners. It became Lloyd's of London. In 1698 Jonathan's began posting stock prices on its wall. It became the London Stock Exchange. The same year Café Procope seated Voltaire.
- 1773
- Americans threw tea into Boston harbour and made coffee their drink.
- The 1930s
- A laboratory in Kenya selected a plant for drought and found it tasted like nothing before it. In 2004 a variety Panama had planted to break the wind sold for a price nobody had seen.
- 2015
- UNESCO inscribed Arabic coffee — the dallah, the finjan, the guest served first — as a heritage of humanity. This region did not learn hospitality from coffee. It taught coffee hospitality.
Today
Coffee is how people meet.
How a stranger becomes a guest, a guest a friend, and a conversation something that changes a mind.
The house
22:22 is a house built on that. One shop in each city. Twenty-two coffees a year, and one more.
The Twenty-Two of Abu Dhabi. Each year the house selects twenty-two coffees. They are not announced. They are met.
Twelve are sent to members, one a month, in an order the house decides. Six are poured in the room, in the order the plant travelled the world. Four can be found in the shop. Every coffee met comes with its card.
A member who has met all twenty-two has completed the year. The house records it, by name, for life. When the year closes, the house publishes the Record — every coffee, its producer, its origin, its process, and what the house scored it — and the year begins again at zero.
And one more. Beyond the twenty-two is the rarest coffee the house holds in a year. It is never sold. Once a year it is allocated, privately, to the members at the top of the house, who write in a sealed envelope what they would give for it. The house never says what it was given. Its card carries the mark 22:23 — the minute after the time. Membership does not guarantee it. Being present does.
There is a waiting list.
Our current selectionA year in the house: what it is, what it opens, what it costs.