A-C-M-E spells doom.

To help catch his elusive prey Wile E. Coyote keeps putting his faith in the latest contraption manufactured by the Acme Corporation. The tactic invariably backfires, bringing only pain and humiliation to the hapless predator.

Miles Kirby, the head-chef and co-patron of the London restaurant and coffee roastery Caravan, blames these calamitous mishaps on the consumer, not the corporation. “It’s the user who doesn’t get it right,”  insists the New Zealand expat.

He would say that. His two restaurants don’t merely serve their house-roasted coffees in cups made by Acme. Caravan is the UK distributor of Acme & Co., their New Zealand manufacturer. Jeff Kennedy, Acme’s creator as well as the New Zealand coffee pioneer behind first Cafe L’Affaire and now PREFAB, both in Wellington, is a friend.

Give Kennedy his do. Rather than scapegoat fumble-fingered customers he designed durable coffee cups with them very much in mind. If the Coyote dropped a filled Acme coffee cup from the top of the Shard (surely an act of intent given the secure hold provided by the wide loop handles) it would miss the Road Runner by a hair, bounce back up from the Tooley Street pavement and plonk the attempted murderer on the noggin. The steamed milk and rich espresso flung high into the London sky would fall back into the upright and undamaged cup, forming a swirly, two-toned likeness of a beep-beeping Road Runner on its surface. If the bruised Coyote finally captured something it would be the World Latte Art Championship.

To baristas and coffee shopkeepers, the added practical appeal of the Acme coffee cups is in their volumetrics – geekspeak for sizing. Eschewing generic measures or guesswork Acme’s cup sizes correspond to specific coffee drinks (flat white, cappuccino, latte, etc). Form follows function.

Acme’s white-rimmed saucers are interchangeable: The 145mm saucer fits three cup sizes – 150ml, 170ml and 190ml. There’s no worry about matching the right cup to the right saucer, an impossible task in the early morning when you’re pre-coffee and your eyes are half-shut.

The heavy-duty cups make a fashion statement, too. Actually it’s more of an anti-fashion fashion statement, the new law of  averages, that is to say, of looking average to set oneself apart. The branding is discreet; the effect, normcore (“normal” + “hardcore”). The almost generic design is about sameness, anonymity, functionality, simplicity.

Sure, Acme cups are available in groovy, midcentury hues of green, red and blue that can be matched or mixed. But it’s the dullest colours – brown, black and grey – that are most sought by indie coffee shops.

Brooklyn Coffee is a new minimalist coffee bar in London’s Shoreditch whose very name announces its hipster intentions. Its Acme coffee cups are white on the inside and the lip, as they all are, and white on the outside surfaces, too.

Caffeinating a trend where the best decoration is none, Acme’s white-on-white espresso cup and saucer might be the purest expression of a style whose appeal is plain as plain can be.

The Acme name comes full circle.

Acme cups and sauces can be purchased in the UK from Caravan and in Canada from Eight Ounce Coffee.

left: old menu. right: new menu

The trouble with his old menu, according to Gwilym, was that the coffee names mythologised what were, from his hands, fundamentally the same drink: a double espresso blended with varying quantities of milk he steamed and textured in the identical manner. Furthermore, the terms were confusing and meant different things to different people from different places. It was problematic to figure out what each customer’s understanding of a flat white or a cortado was and frustrating when what the barista champion served measured below – or above – each one’s expectations.

His new 4-6-8 system is simpler and clearer, except for metric minds who don’t really know what ounces are and don’t wish to do conversions before they’ve had their caffeine fix. For these aliens, Gwilym first takes out his three white paper cups and then performs his usual coffee magic show.