Drift is about coffee, the people who drink it, and the cities they inhabit. Our collection of writers and photographers, alongside coffee shop owners, baristas, streetcart vendors, and patrons, capture a glimpse of what it’s like to drink coffee in a city at the time the magazine is printed. Each issue highlights a different city.
In this issue:
Drift Volume 12 is a bundle of postcards from this beloved capital of art, culture, romance, history, fashion, and cuisine. But until recently, Paris wasn’t celebrated for its coffee. Although the city’s famous sidewalk cafes have become a glamorous backdrop against which people want to be seen, coffee merely served as prop—good for looking, not for drinking. Fortunately, changing tides have brought waves of coffee entrepreneurs and aficionados, who are creating an exciting, new coffee culture that has invaded Paris’s picturesque alleyways and grand boulevards. This issue visits the centuries and arrondissements, and peeks behind the old façades and new, that, together with the imagination and passion of Parisians and expats alike, make the City of Light an emerging destination for serious coffee roasters, brewers, and drinkers.
Drift Volume 12 includes:
A bright, yellow tricycle peddles (and pedals) coffee around the city in hopes of changing the lives of Paris’s homeless for the better.
How an unlikely Ottoman, who received a frosty royal reception, introduced coffee and “Turkmania” to Parisians.
Reflections by a lovesick traveler, in a Paris of cigarettes and coffee for a layover.
Wading into the divide between brasseries from coffee shops, and appreciating their differences.
From the chipped-paint storefront of an old cordonnerie—cobbler—to a fashion label in the gardens of a former palace, the face of Paris’s coffee shops are changing.
