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Café de olla, literally pot coffee, is a traditional Mexican drink brewed in an unglazed earthenware pot with water, dark ground coffee, cinnamon, and panela, also called piloncillo, with orange peel, anise, and cloves as common additions. It is drunk mainly in cold climates and rural areas of Mexico, including high country in the Sierra Madre, alongside hearty staples like pozole, menudo, and tam...

Karsk is a Scandinavian drink of equal parts hot coffee and clear spirit: six centiliters of pure alcohol such as Everclear, vodka, or homemade moonshine, matched with six centiliters of coffee that must be heated but never boiled. Purists insist on moonshine because it has no flavor of its own and leaves the coffee in front, a claim the episode questions. The drink was popular in a rural Swedish...

In 1963 Leslie Buck, an Eastern European immigrant selling blank paper cups for the Sherri Cup Company in New York, noticed how many of the city's diners, coffee shops, and food carts were run by Greek families who had arrived after World War II. To win their orders, he designed a cup just for them: blue and white like the Greek flag, a Greek key border around the rims, an ancient two handled pitc...

Nearly all the world's coffee comes from two species: Coffea arabica, prized for flavor but dependent on cool highlands, and Coffea canephora, or Robusta, hardier but harsher. Coffea stenophylla, the narrow leaved coffee also known as highland or Sierra Leone coffee, grows as a shrub or small tree of 3 to 6 meters across Guinea, Ivory Coast, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, with glossy tapered leaves an...

For much of the 20th century the perk and gurgle of a percolator was the sound of the American morning. Inside, water in the bottom chamber boils and steam bubbles channeled up a central tube act like a gas lift pump, throwing hot water against the lid and down through a perforated basket of coarse grounds. The brewed liquid falls back into the reservoir and is pumped through again and again, so t...

On café menus in Sydney and Auckland, the long black sits beside the short black and the Americano, and the episode argues that choosing between them changes the physics in the cup. A long black is about 100 to 120 milliliters, roughly four ounces, of hot water with a double shot of espresso extracted directly on top. A traditional Americano reverses the order and the strength: a single shot goes...

Lungo is Italian for long, and a caffè lungo is an espresso pulled with roughly twice the usual water through the same dose of ground coffee. A standard shot, the normale, takes about 18 to 30 seconds and yields 25 to 30 milliliters, while a lungo can run for up to a full minute and fill the cup with 50 to 70 milliliters. The episode lays out the brewing ratios behind the menu: a ristretto near 1:...

Angelo Moriondo was born in Turin on June 6, 1851, into a family of luxury makers: his grandfather founded a liqueur company, and his father Giacomo, with Angelo's uncle Agostino and a cousin, founded the chocolate firm Moriondo and Gariglio. Angelo bought the Grand Hotel Ligure in Piazza Carlo Felice and the American Bar in the Galleria Nazionale on Via Roma, and ran into the same daily bottlenec...

On July 14, 1683, Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha laid siege to Vienna, the city the Ottomans had failed to take in 1529 and prized as the key to the Danube trade routes. The campaign grew out of Emperor Leopold I's crackdown on Protestants in Hungary, which sparked a revolt led by Imre Thokoly, whom the Ottomans backed and promised a crown. The Ottoman army, 90,000 to over 170,000 people driving...

In the southern Ethiopian highlands, the Kingdom of Kaffa sat inside a natural fortress: the Gojeb River to the north, the Omo River wrapping the east and south, and steep ravines and dense forest in between. The soil gave three harvests a year, and the Kafecho people spoke an Omotic language unrelated to the Semitic tongues of the northern empire. Around 1390 a ruler named Minjo ousted the Mato d...

In 1913 Sigmund Freud, Leon Trotsky, Joseph Stalin, and Adolf Hitler all lived in Vienna, and all were regulars at the same institution, the Viennese coffee house. UNESCO describes it as a place where time and space are consumed but only the coffee appears on the bill. The episode breaks down how the room was built for lingering: historicist interiors, marble tabletops, bentwood Thonet No. 14 chai...

Illy Ferenc was born in Temesvár in the Austro Hungarian Empire, a city now called Timișoara in Romania. Conscripted into the Austro Hungarian army in World War I, he was left without a homeland when the empire dissolved and the Treaty of Trianon redrew the map, so he stayed with his sister in Trieste, newly under Italian rule. As Francesco Illy he founded a business there in 1933 trading cocoa an...

Astronauts long drank instant coffee from pouches, until Italian aerospace firm Argotec and Lavazza teamed up in 2014 to ask whether real espresso could be brewed without gravity. The Italian Space Agency sponsored the ISSpresso as a payload, which opened the path to NASA approval. In an 18 month program the team built four versions: a 2D model to prove the plumbing, an elegance model for the mech...

Tasseography, the reading of tea leaves or coffee grounds, has a name built from French tasse, borrowed from Arabic tassa, plus Greek suffixes. Tea leaf reading began in China soon after tea itself, while coffee reading followed coffee out of Yemen through the Ottoman Empire and the Balkans, carried across borders in part by Romani oral tradition. In Europe older diviners read molten wax or lead d...

The demitasse, French for half cup, holds about 60 to 90 milliliters, half of the roughly 120 milliliter tasse à café. Yet by the early 20th century the word had vanished in France, and in May 1946 scholar Clifford H. Bissell examined its disappearance in Modern Language Notes, published by Johns Hopkins University Press. The explanation is a semantic shift: once concentrated coffee became the eve...

Before a roaster ever sees it, a coffee bean has survived years of farming, fermentation, milling, and sorting. Coffee is grown in about 70 countries by roughly 100 million people, with Latin America producing almost 60% of Arabica and Vietnam leading Robusta. A new tree takes five years to give a useful harvest. Strip picking pulls ripe and unripe cherries together, and unripe fruit becomes Quake...

For its first 12 years, the Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte contained no pumpkin at all. The flavor comes from pumpkin pie spice, a premixed tin of cinnamon, nutmeg, clove, and ginger that spice companies were selling by the 1930s, and small coffee shops were already adding fall spices in the 1990s. Tori Amos even told a 1995 Seattle crowd about her own pumpkin pie coffee. In early 2003 Starbucks te...

A true flat white is a double espresso of about 50 milliliters with roughly 130 milliliters of steamed milk and a thin, glossy layer of microfoam around five millimeters deep, served in a 175 to 200 milliliter cup. That makes it stronger than a latte and far less foamy than a cappuccino, and its smooth surface made it the drink of choice for latte art. Oddly, the name appears first in England: a c...

The little green frog seal on coffee, tea, and bananas belongs to the Rainforest Alliance, founded in 1987 by Daniel Katz. As of 2023 it covered more than 70 countries, over seven and a half million farmers and workers, and more than 5.7 million hectares. After merging with the Dutch program UTZ in 2018, it rolled out the 2020 Sustainable Agriculture Standard with two tiers: core requirements such...

Order a white coffee and what arrives depends on where you are standing. In Britain it simply means black coffee with a cold or room temperature whitener, which is what separates it from a café au lait made with steamed milk. In New England and New York the same drink is light or regular coffee. In American specialty cafes, white coffee means beans pulled from the roaster at a yellow roast, brewed...

In the working class cafes of Naples, a customer having a lucky day would pay for two coffees, drink one, and leave the second suspended for a stranger who could not afford it. The caffè sospeso was built on anonymity: the giver and receiver never meet, the barista acts as a neutral go-between, and the person asking keeps their dignity. The tradition faded during Italy's postwar boom of the 1950s...

Coffea liberica makes up less than 1.5% of commercially grown coffee, yet it once sold for up to five times the price of other coffee. The trees reach 20 meters, so harvesters use ladders, and the asymmetrical, hooked beans reach about 12 millimeters, with 100 beans weighing 23.2 to 25.7 grams in a Selangor, Malaysia study. Cuppers compare it to jackfruit. A light roast keeps the fruit, a medium r...

George Constant Lewis Washington was born in May 1871 in Kortrijk, Belgium, to a Belgian mother and an English father, which made him a British subject until he became an American citizen in 1918. After a chemistry degree at the University of Bonn and marriage to Angeline in 1895, he arrived in New York around 1896 and started the George Washington Lighting Company in Jersey City, making kerosene...

Until the late 1800s Britain ran a profitable coffee industry in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, and a fungus wiped it out, pushing the colony and the country toward tea. That fungus, Hemileia vastatrix, is coffee leaf rust, first described by Berkeley and Broome in 1869 from Ceylon samples and nicknamed Devastating Emily by planters. It is an obligate parasite that enters leaf pores within 24 to 48 hours,...

Coffee as a drink first shows up credibly in 15th century Yemen, around the port of Mocha, where Sufi monks used it to stay awake through night devotions. Pilgrims carried it to Mecca and along trade routes to Medina, Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, and Constantinople. The coffee houses that followed became secular gathering places for news and political talk, and the authorities pushed back: orthodox i...