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Order a mocha today and you expect chocolate, but the word once had nothing to do with it. Between the 15th and 17th centuries, Mokha on Yemen's Red Sea coast was the bottleneck of the world coffee trade, shipping beans grown in the nearby mountains. European buyers began calling any Arabian coffee mocha, and then merchants stretched the label further: Ethiopian beans mixed with a few Yemeni ones,...

The molecule in your morning cup evolved as a pesticide. More than 60 plant species, including coffee, tea, yerba mate, and cacao, arrived at caffeine independently because it paralyzes and kills the insects that chew on them. Fallen coffee leaves leach it into the soil to stop rival seeds from germinating, while trace amounts in nectar give bees a dopamine hit that makes them return. German chemi...

Juan Valdez has a staggering resume: global travel, a Hollywood cameo, a famous mule named Conchita, and the job of representing more than half a million Colombian coffee growers. He also never existed. In 1958 the National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia faced a problem: American roasters blended their hand-picked, high-altitude beans from volcanic Andean soil into anonymous tins of chea...

In 1996, as Vietnam's economy opened to the world, Đặng Lê Nguyên Vũ and Lê Hoàng Diệp Thảo started Trung Nguyên in Buôn Ma Thuột, the coffee capital of Đắk Lắk province. Instead of exporting cheap green beans for foreign roasters to brand, they set out to roast and sell a finished product at home. Their first shop opened in Ho Chi Minh City in October 1998, and by 2000 they reached Hanoi and 100...

NHL defenseman Tim Horton, who began his career in 1949, first tried hamburger stands in North Bay, Ontario, with partner Jim Charade. On May 17, 1964, he opened Tim Horton Donuts in Hamilton, and Hamilton police constable Ron Joyce soon took over management, becoming a 50-50 partner by 1967. After Horton died in a 1974 car crash, Joyce bought out the family's shares for $1 million and franchised...

Starbucks almost got a different name. Told that words starting with ST sounded strong, the founders found an old Cascade mining town called Starbo on a map before settling on Starbuck, the first mate in Moby-Dick. Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegl, and Gordon Bowker opened at Seattle's Pike Place Market on March 30, 1971, selling only beans and equipment, and at first bought green beans from Alfred Peet....

Starbucks did not invent its most famous blended drink. The Frappuccino came from the Coffee Connection, George Howell's chain in eastern Massachusetts, and the name was coined by marketing director Andrew Frank. It fused cappuccino with frappe, the New England word for a thick ice cream milkshake, giving adults permission to order dessert as coffee. Starbucks bought the Coffee Connection in 1994,...

Les Deux Magots began as a fabric and novelty shop on Rue de Buci in Paris that specialized in silk lingerie. It took its name from a popular play, Les Deux Magots de la Chine, and installed two statues of Chinese figures, magot meaning a stocky figurine from the Far East. The shop moved to 6 Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés in 1873 and in 1884 became a café and liquoriste, keeping the odd name and th...

Arabica evolved as an understory shrub beneath forest canopy, and for generations it was farmed that way. In the mid-1970s, pressure for higher yields and fear of coffee leaf rust pushed farmers toward new sun tolerant varieties planted densely in cleared fields. Between 1996 and 2014 the share of land in shade grown coffee fell by nearly 20 percent. Research shows what that trade removes: a shade...

Until the 17th century, Arab merchants kept a tight monopoly on coffee by exporting only roasted or baked beans that could never sprout. According to legend, the Indian Sufi Baba Budan broke it on his return from a pilgrimage to Mecca, smuggling seven raw coffee seeds strapped to his chest. He planted them in the hills of Chikmagalur in present day Karnataka, whose altitude, soil, and shade suited...

Decaf's story starts with Goethe, who handed chemist Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge a carton of rare Arabian coffee beans, which Runge used to isolate caffeine for the first time. The commercial breakthrough came from an accident in 1903, when German merchant Ludwig Roselius found that a seawater soaked shipment had lost its caffeine but kept its flavor. He patented a process in 1906 that steamed beans...

Vietnamese egg coffee, cà phê trứng, was created in late 1940s Hanoi by Nguyen Giang, founder of Giang Cafe, according to his son. During the First Indochina War fresh milk vanished and even condensed milk was rationed or too costly, so Giang whipped raw egg yolks with a little condensed milk and sugar to supply the fat and richness his customers expected. The recipe uses four ingredients: yolks,...

Vietnamese iced coffee began as a workaround. French colonists and locals wanted café au lait, but 19th century Vietnam had almost no dairy farming and fresh milk spoiled fast in the heat. Shelf stable sweetened condensed milk took its place, and ice answered the climate. To cut through all that sugar, brewers used dark roasted robusta, a lowland bean with nearly double arabica's caffeine, which t...

After the 1929 crash wiped out demand, a French Italian bank called Sudameris was stuck by 1932 with a huge surplus of Brazilian coffee beans that would soon rot. It asked Nestlé for a way to preserve them. Max Morgenthaler led years of development and refined spray drying, misting concentrated coffee into a tower of hot air so water evaporated in midair and flavor compounds stayed trapped in the...

In postwar Britain, motorcycles were family workhorses hauling sidecars full of groceries and children. When rationing eased in the late 1950s and families could buy cars, cheap secondhand bikes and retired military machines flooded the market. Working class teenagers known as Rockers stripped off sidecars, fenders, and panels and raced between transport cafes on arterial roads, such as London's A...

In 1760 Nicola di Maddalena, a member of Rome's Greek community, opened a coffee house at Via Condotti 86, and the Greek connection gave Antico Caffè Greco its name. It became the oldest coffee house in Rome and the second oldest in Italy after Caffè Florian in Venice. Unlike a stand up espresso bar, it sprawled across nine connected rooms built for lingering, a layout that pushed patrons into cha...

In the 1800s Father Francisco Romero of Salazar de las Palmas handed confessing parishioners a task in place of prayers: plant coffee trees. That penance helped spread the crop through Santander, Cundinamarca, and Antioquia, though coffee had reached Colombia around 1790 and Jesuit José Gumilla noted it in 1730 at a mission near the Meta and Orinoco rivers. The first recorded export, just 100 bags...

In 1975 Nestlé employee Eric Favre stood in a crowded espresso bar near the Pantheon in Rome and noticed that the busiest barista pumped his lever again and again, forcing air and pressurized water through the grounds to build a thicker crema. Back in Switzerland, Favre set out to trap that technique inside a hermetically sealed aluminum capsule, and Nestlé patented the system in 1976. The early m...

Before Mr. Coffee, the American morning cup came from the percolator, a device that boiled brewed coffee back over the grounds again and again until it tasted burnt and bitter. In Cleveland, Ohio, business partners Vincent Marotta and Samuel Glazer ran North American Systems, a coffee delivery company serving offices, and saw that home kitchens had no equivalent of the commercial drip brewer. They...

The Wiener Melange, or Vienna blend, is often compared to a cappuccino, but the traditional version is gentler. Vienna's Cafe Sperl makes it with half a cup of mild brewed coffee and half a cup of steamed cream, topped with milk foam. Brewed coffee pulls fewer sharp acids than espresso, and cream with around 36 percent butterfat coats the palate, so the drink blends into one soft, rich cup instead...

Paper filtering predates Melitta Bentz: Johann Georg Krünitz described blotting paper in a tinned cone in 1782, and in 1847 Ellard Romershausen tried paper in an early air press. Most people still strained coffee through linen, wool, hemp, silk, or horsehair that trapped oils which went rancid, and in 1885 one writer warned the public to stop filtering coffee through old wallpaper, at a time when...

Amalie Auguste Melitta Liebscher was born in Dresden in January 1873 to a book publisher, with grandparents who owned a brewery. Married to Hugo Bentz and raising Willi, Horst, and Herta, she was fed up with bitter coffee from percolators, slow gritty early espresso filters, and stained linen bags. She punched holes in a brass pot with a nail, lined it with blotting paper from her son's school not...

Joel Owsley Cheek moved to Nashville in 1884 as a coffee broker and teamed up with British broker Roger Nolley Smith, who could name a green bean's origin by smell. After years of blending, in 1892 Cheek gave 20 pounds of coffee free to the buyer at the Maxwell House Hotel. When it ran out and the hotel went back to its cheaper brand, guests complained, the hotel bought Cheek's blend exclusively,...

Kopitiam joins the Malay word kopi, coffee, with the Hokkien tiam, shop, and the name maps the Chinese communities who opened them across Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, and southern Thailand. Singapore has about 2,000. The owner usually runs the drink stall, with coffee, tea, soft boiled eggs, and kaya toast, and leases the other stalls to hawkers selling Hainanese chicken rice, nasi lema...

Brothers Giuseppe and Bruno Bambi founded La Marzocco in Florence in 1927, naming it for the city's seated lion symbol after building a first machine, the Fiorenza, on commission. In 1939 they patented a horizontal boiler that laid the old vertical column on its side and set the brew groups in a row, so baristas could face customers. Giuseppe's son Piero joined in the early 1950s, and the Poker se...