For Australians, our coffee culture is a source of national pride – brought across from Greek and Italian migrants post-World War 2 and lovingly crafted into our own distinct style. For most of Australia, coffee is still a ritual of the morning commute - 24 per cent of all coffee is consumed between 7am and 8am. For Joseph Atallah, coffee has always been something slower and more deliberate, a way of gathering people rather than fuelling a day.
“In Lebanon, coffee is the centre for everybody who gets together,” he says. “Alcohol less so than coffee. I think coffee is far more common. Whenever there’s a gathering, you have maybe one or two coffees. And it happens often.”
Born in Lebanon and arriving in Australia at twelve, Atallah grew up between two very different coffee worlds. In the Middle East, coffee is thick and unfiltered, brewed slowly on the stovetop and poured into tiny cups. In Australia, espresso-based takeaway drinks dominate coffee culture. Atallah’s invention, a polished machine called the Zou Zou that brews Turkish and Arabic-style coffee with the touch of a button, is his way of combining the ritual of one world with the convenience of the other.
Source: Getty / Alexander Spatari/Getty Images
“Arabic coffee or Turkish coffee is embedded in the society,” he explains. “You should never drink coffee alone, and you should never have just one cup.” While espresso is brewed by pushing water through it at pressure, Turkish coffee is made by boiling the coffee and water together from room temperature.
When brewing Turkish coffee, the fine ground coffee isn’t filtered out, a hallmark of the tradition and one of the biggest engineering hurdles Atallah faced when adapting the traditional brewing methods for a modern machine. Finding a way to pump unfiltered hot coffee without clogging the system took years of trial and error.
“It took six or seven years,” Atallah recalls. “Most pumps can’t handle the little particles in there. We could have gone to filtered coffee, to actually remove the grind from the coffee — but that wouldn’t be Turkish coffee.”
“Some people bring it to the boil a few times,” Atallah says. “They believe it gets more of the flavour of the coffee into the water. It’s probably evenly divided – some people like the crema, some people like no crema. So we had to cater for both.” The Zou Zou allows for both traditions – one setting performs a single gentle boil, another allows the drinker to repeat the process for a richer, more intense flavour.
The ability to translate centuries of habit into a modern machine comes partly from Atallah’s background in food science and organic chemistry. After studying at the University of New South Wales, he spent years experimenting with flavour, starting with chocolate before turning to coffee. “When it comes to any food, it’s all chemistry,” he says. “I started with chocolate, because we had pretty ordinary chocolate in those days, and I knew there was a better chocolate.”
Atallah eventually started running chocolate and perfume-making classes before turning his attention to coffee. “Once I had a lot of time on my hands, I realised there are no commercial Turkish coffee machines for restaurants or cafes to make coffee. So I started working on that and seven years later, we have the product.”
You should never drink coffee alone, and you should never have just one cup.Joseph Atallah
Zou Zou offers diasporic communities a way to connect with home, while also introducing a wider audience to the richness of the tradition. The name itself is a nod to his heritage.
“In Lebanon, every Joseph, and there are many, has the nickname Zouzou,” he laughs. “In every family, there’s a son, a brother, an uncle — always a Zouzou.”
Atallah hopes to see the Zou Zou on café counters and kitchen benches across the country, anywhere people gather to share a story over coffee.
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