Beans, Rhymes & Life: j.flowers.mp3, Dutchkid & Melk Coffee in Sidcup
Songwriter, barista, artist… Jordi Van Dyk on the mix of music and Melk, by Joe Bill
Jordi Van Dyk
I could start this article by telling you that the precision and care that Jordi Van Dyk puts into every note of his records is replicated in the exactitude of every cup served from his Melk Coffee Co. store in Sidcup. And I’d be fu*king right.
Perhaps better known as j.flowers.mp3 (@j.flowers.mp3), or even one portion of alt-electro outfit Dutchkid (@dutchkidmusic), Jordi has his hands full. While writing music for Sony, he is also a new father, while a new venture, Melk, has just turned six months old. Opening the coffee shop alongside friend and fellow brewing nut Neil Plumpton this summer, Melk (@melkcoffeeco) has quickly become a go-to place in the town for amazing specialty coffees and banging sourdough toast.
WOULD YOU LIKE MELK WITH THAT?
Neil retired from a job in the City in 2019 and promptly set about realising his dream of opening a coffee shop, doing research in stores throughout London and Kent.
“I used to go places in Whitstable and Tunbridge Wells and really developed a taste for more specialty coffee,” he says. “But I wanted to get some experience as a barista, so I got a job at Catch. when it opened in Sidcup high street. That’s where I met Jordi, who was a barista, too.”
After three months, Neil left his post but having hit it off with Jordi so well that they promised to each other that if they were ever to open their own coffee shop they’d do it together.
“In South Africa I started working in cafés early and managed my first coffee shop when I was 18,” says Jordi. “Alongside coffee, I was always doing the music, but, as you know with music, it’s quite difficult to pay the bills. So coffee was always a consistent thing that I was doing alongside as a side hustle. When we moved to the UK from South Africa, I was working in a coffee shop - that’s where I met Neil. And we just bonded over coffee and the idea of having our own space that feels welcoming to people that enjoy considered coffee.”
After a three-month refurb, the former window shutters in Station Road was transformed into Melk, with its exposed brickwork and beams, white tiles and dotted plants, opening in April 2023.
“From day one it’s been good,” says Neil. “When people first came in and thanked us for opening, we sort of knew we were on to something. We’ve been upping our game slowly but surely to do more single-origin coffee and people drinking long blacks, cortados, pour-overs, v60s and that sort of specialist stuff. That’s what we always wanted to do. But we didn’t know whether Sidcup was ready for it. But it’s ready for it.”
As well as cups of coffee, customers are also buying bags of beans at Melk, supplied by Butterworth & Son in Bury St Edmunds.
“We thought about the figure we might do, but we’ve exceeded that by quite a margin,” says Neil. “We use their four-bean-blend because it’s a good consistent coffee every single day, it’s not like you’re trying to do a single-origin, which can change in flavours and notes.”
And consistency is the key, as Neil explains. “We want people to come in every single day knowing they get the same consistency every day,” he says. “You’ve got three arabica beans in there for consistency and one robusta to add that little kick at the end.”
These guys are properly into their technicals. Serious coffee boffins. But it’s totally infectious. They explain that their machines grind by weight metrics - always 18 grams. And their volumetrics mean that the machine pumps out 36 grams of fluid for each serving.
Neil Plumpton & Jordi Van Dyk
“The only thing we have to worry about is if the grinder does it in 30 seconds,” says Neil. “The volumetrics come out in 30 seconds, but we have to adjust the grinder to do that in our amount of time. So that’s the variable. We will dial in the grinder three or four times a day depending on how busy it is.”
There’s more about pre-infusing the ‘puck’ with water, valves and pressure, but I will leave that up to you (reader) to go and ask more questions. The guys will happily oblige.
They have a consistent guest roaster on, Essex’s Wood St Coffee Roasters, but the single-origin coffees change each month to keep things fresh.
Using a local indie cake-maker for their banana bread and lemon drizzle cake, Melk are also flying through 18 loaves’ worth of sourdough toast each week, sourced from Chez Maitre in nearby Eltham - known for competing for top gongs in the UK baguette- and croissant-making championships.
There’s a hell of a lot of passion, knowledge and research going into each cup at Melk.
“We travel all over the place,” says Jordi. “When we’re not working, we’re spending our days in other coffee shops. I go to Brighton so often, the coffee culture there is insane - you can go to 20 coffee shops in the same street and they are all fantastic. We always want to try to improve ourselves and grow.”
Noticing the bass guitar hung on the wall at the back of the shop, it’s time to talk music.
THE ADDED MP3
We first discovered Dutchkid during a new music session in October 2019 with the release of their single Say, which has since had almost a million streams on Spotify alone.
A collective of musicians who had come together to create a host of indie-synth-pop tracks, Dutchkid have been signed to Ultra (now taken over by Sony) for a few years and just released new album Pixels, which is picking up decent traction. We didn’t know, until more recently, that one of the key driving sources behind the band was Jordi, a talented musician who moved here from South Africa with his wife six years ago.
His talent for creating banging tunes saw him picked up as a songwriter, a job he manages on the side of Dutchkid and Melk. Oh yeah, and that’s where the name comes from - it’s the Afrikaans or Dutch word for milk. In fact, the link to his home country has seen the shop pick up customers from the sizeable local Saffa community, including a live broadcast from the shop by South Africa’s national radio station Five FM. Back to the music.
“We call Dutchkid a collective because everyone in the band is kind of really talented at something else,” says Jordi. “Two of the guys are graphic designers, another guy’s a videographer and another guy is the CFO of Coco, the music venue in Camden. And I’m here, doing coffee.”
More recently, ‘cene Magazine has featured tracks by Jordi in his other guise, j.flowers.mp3, a solo project that has a very different feel to Dutchkid.
“It started in lockdown, everyone was isolated, so I was just writing songs that were quite different to the Dutchkid stuff - more like R&B, hip-hop and spoken word. I grew up listening to rap music, that was my love. I was exploring that and I had just massive amounts of songs and was like, ‘I need to put this stuff out’.”
Jet Plane 5000 featuring Ralph Taylor and Rebekah Fitch has already reached the half-million streams mark, while latest single Coffee (hmm, I wonder what inspired that) has had plays on Radio One and BBC Introducing in Kent.
“Yeah, it’s pretty cool,” says Jordi. “I built a really good relationship with Abbie McCarthy, she’s been a massive supporter and really encouraging. She will often play tracks on her show. And she’ll give me my little clues that she’s pushed it to Radio One to see if they will play it. I’m just so stoked.”
You know how I started this article, talking about precision and care? Well, it figures again in the story behind Jordi’s solo name.
“The concept of j.flowers.mp3 is, and maybe it’s just too soft or cheesy, but the idea that every song is kind of like a flower. It’s like here is one of my flowers in the song and they kind of make a bouquet. That’s how I thought about it.”
The added ‘.mp3’ helped to distinguish the artist from the many other J Flowers (yeah, there’s a lot) releasing music online, but also it’s visually pleasing in our ultra-digital world.
Jordi has another track coming out on November 10th, featuring friends and collaborators edbl and Baby Eleanor.
“My music is an opportunity for me to be with my mates and just have some fun,” says Jordi. “It’s the reason there’s always collaborations, or featuring one of my friends. It’s an opportunity for me to be in a musical space… and be able to showcase them and be a little bit creative as well.”
While we can’t pry as to who Jordi has written tracks for in the industry, we have a feeling he has a cave of wonders backed up on his hard drive. Surely, Melk is a great place to gauge the temperature and test them out on the unsuspecting public.
“I couldn’t do it, man,” says Jordi. “Neil plays my music, but I don’t know how I feel about it. I wouldn’t want to see people walking out of the shop!”
