Coffee Stains

A bad cup won't sink an economy — but it tells visitors everything about whether we mean what we promise.

If we treat coffee as the mind-altering drug it actually is, the range of treatment it receives — even in little ol’ Kuching — is surprising. You have the glorious cafés like Earthlings, Blendsmiths and Kosa Coffee, which serve their coffee on a culinary pedestal, accompanied by equally glorious sandwiches, pastries and cakes, and even prettified, instagrammable hot meals. And then you have the atrocious swampy black water you find in conference rooms — lukewarm, watered down, tasting like overnight dishwater.

But anyone planning to host the business crowd should understand one simple thing: if you want to do business meetings well, you need to do coffee well. Business people drink copious amounts of kopi.

We drink it before meetings, between panel sessions, after flights, and through the third speech of the morning. We drink it black, hot, with milk, with sugar, with frothed milk, in every quantity. We drink it cold, iced, dripped, steamed, pressed, filtered. Some take it flavoured with almond, hazelnut or vanilla. Others want their non-dairy milks — oat, coconut, soya, even rice. Coffee is not just a drink. Coffee sustains business.

And yet so many hotels in Kuching choose to pretend that coffee is just another cordial with a different colour. Do they not realise that the moment it touches the lips of a business guest, the entire hotel is being judged — harshly and instantly — regardless of everything else?

Venue decisions have been made on the strength of the coffee alone.

But the bigger point is this: bad coffee is rarely just a coffee problem. It is a standards problem. It suggests that the people responsible for the experience are not living it themselves — that they are managing the programme, the seating plan and the VIP protocol, but not inhabiting the event as a guest would.

That guest’s reality includes the registration queue, the Wi-Fi, the breakfast, the shuttle bus, and the coffee at the break. Business travellers live by these details. A poor breakfast or a badly managed break does not destroy an event, but it changes the mood around it. It tells people whether the host understands the rhythm of business.

And it raises an uncomfortable question: if we cannot get coffee right, what else are we missing? Coffee is not a mega-project. It needs no masterplan, no foreign consultant, no ribbon-cutting. Buy decent beans. Use clean equipment. Train the people making it. Taste it. Improve it. Repeat. When something this simple is consistently poor, it is fair to wonder about our ability to deliver on more complex promises.

This may sound unfair — a bad cup does not mean a city cannot build hospitals or industrial parks. But impressions do not work like audit reports. People judge from signals, and small failures breed doubt about larger capabilities. That is why coffee matters: not as coffee, but as evidence. It tells a visitor whether standards here are lived or merely announced.

None of this is a snobbish plea for imported taste. This is not about replacing local kopi with some precious drink described in tasting notes of berries, flowers and moral superiority. Sarawak has its own coffee traditions, and they deserve respect. The point is not that everything should taste like Melbourne or Milan. The point is that whatever we serve should be good, intentional and properly made. Kopi-O can be excellent. Hotel coffee can be excellent. The issue is never style; it is care.

Sarawak’s growing ambitions needs infrastructure, capital and talent. But it also needs a culture of execution — and that culture is built through details. Through people who test things before guests arrive, who ask whether the coffee is drinkable, whether the microphone works, whether the experience matches the promise. Big ambitions are tested in small details long before they are tested in big projects.

A good cup of coffee will not transform Sarawak’s economy. But it can tell us whether we are serious about the economy we are trying to build.

In 2025, Sarawak delivered more than 160 business events. Conferences, investment forums and trade summits are not just gatherings; they are economic signals. They tell the outside world that a place is open, connected and ready to do business. They fill hotels, activate restaurants, and put a city on the mental map of the people who make decisions.

But who is making the coffee?