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Latte art is drawn on a canvas that is falling apart. Crema is an emulsion of coffee oils and trapped carbon dioxide that starts off-gassing the instant it forms, and steamed milk holds air only because heat unfolds whey and casein proteins into bridges around tiny bubbles, which then rise and drain the moment steaming stops. The modern craft took shape in Seattle: around 1986 Jack Kelly at Uptown...

A coffee cherry normally holds two seeds that press against each other as they grow, like two passengers sharing an airplane armrest, which is why most beans are flat on one side. In roughly 5 percent of cherries only one ovule is fertilized, and the lone seed expands in every direction into a round bean called the peaberry, or caracolillo, meaning little snail, in Spanish-speaking regions. There...

The corrugated cardboard ring slipped onto a hot coffee cup began with one bad morning in 1991. Jay Sorensen, whose career had stalled after a run of ventures that never clicked, was driving his daughter Ryder to school when a drive-thru cup proved too hot to hold and spilled into his lap. He saw a flaw the whole industry had accepted: paper barely resists heat, and cafes were fixing it by double...

Around 1660, Dutch ambassador Johan Nieuhof, stationed in China, is credited as the first person to deliberately experiment with adding milk to coffee, then a bitter, medicinal-seeming drink. Milk's casein proteins bind coffee's tannins, its fat coats the tongue, and its lactose adds sweetness. Europe built a family of drinks on that reaction: the French cafe au lait, Italian caffe latte, Spanish...

Coffee cupping is the clinical tasting method used by Q graders, quality graders certified by the Coffee Quality Institute. Tasters sniff the brew, then slurp it loudly from a deep, bouillon-style spoon so the coffee sprays across the palate and its vapors rise into the nose. Samples sit in eight-ounce glasses on a circular swiveling table, the senior taster goes first, and each mouthful is spat i...

In the 1990s horror series Are You Afraid of the Dark?, the Midnight Society's dramatic handful of midnight dust thrown into the campfire was powdered Coffee-Mate. The effect traces back to the creamer's engineering. Carnation introduced Coffee-Mate on February 2, 1961, as a shelf-stable answer to cream without refrigeration, built on corn syrup solids, hydrogenated vegetable oil, and sodium casei...

A burr mill does not chop; it pulls beans or spices through an adjustable gap between a rotating inner burr and a stationary outer one, so nothing leaves larger than the setting allows. A blade grinder instead produces boulders and dust, and because hot water dissolves acids first, then sugars and oils, and finally bitter tannins, that mix extracts unevenly. The engineering challenge is heat, sinc...

In the early 1990s in Massachusetts, John Sylvan set out to kill stale office coffee by brewing single servings on demand from sealed pods. In 1992 he recruited his Colby College roommate Peter Dragone, then a finance director at Chiquita, and named the company Keurig after a Dutch word for excellence. Unreliable prototypes burned through a $50,000 stake from a Minneapolis investor in 1994 and a $...

In 2009, Lloyd's of London insured the tongue of Costa Coffee's master taster, Gennaro Pelliccia, for 10 million pounds, a measure of how much the chain valued a consistent flavor. The company started far more modestly. Brothers Bruno and Sergio Costa, whose family moved to England from Parma in the 1950s, founded a roastery on Fenchurch Street in London in 1971 and spent a decade supplying catere...

This episode treats a cup of coffee as a chemistry problem that starts with roasting, where beans nearly double in size and flavor-carrying oils migrate to the surface, and grinding, which exposes those oils to oxygen and starts staling within minutes. Blade grinders leave a mix of dust that over-extracts and chunks that under-extract, producing a cup that is bitter and sour at once, while burr gr...

Around 1983, at the Soho Brasserie in London, bartender Dick Bradsell was asked by an American model for a drink that would wake her up and get her drunk at the same time. He never named her. Marie Helvin remains a plausible guess, while later claims about Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss collapse on the timeline, since both were far too young. Bradsell's own account is practical rather than romantic:...

Mocha is not a bean or a chocolate but a Red Sea port in Yemen, spelled Mokha or Mocha, sitting just north of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a bottleneck about 18 miles wide. Before 1538 it was a small fishing village. The Ottomans turned it into a mandatory toll stop, requiring passing ships to put in and pay steep duties, while their governor collected the revenue two days inland in Sanaa. No coffee...

This episode reads a single Wikipedia disambiguation page, the one for the word mazagran, as a fossil record of how a word travels. The trail starts in Algeria, where Mazagran is a town in Mostaganem province and the site of the Battle of Mazagran in 1840. From there the name crossed the Mediterranean: it was given to a village in France and to the Rue de Mazagran in Paris's 10th arrondissement. T...

Unlike an organic or fair trade seal, the words direct trade carry no legal definition and no global oversight, so anyone can print them on a bag. The idea began as a way around the layered commodity chain of local buyers, exporters, importers, and brokers, where a farmer's income tracked prices in New York or London rather than the quality of the crop. Fair trade answers that with a guaranteed mi...

Single origin sounds like one farmer on one misty hillside, but the only baseline requirement is coffee grown within a single known geographic origin, and no universal body polices the label. A few producing countries, such as Brazil, regulate their own exports, but internationally the term is loosely applied. That means a whole nation can count as one origin: beans from Brazil's tropical north an...

Herbert Hyman launched an office coffee service in 1963, when most Americans drank canned, pre-ground coffee left stewing on hot plates. In 1966 he married Mona, and on their honeymoon in Sweden the couple tasted carefully prepared European coffee that reset his ambitions. In 1968 he opened the first Coffee Bean store in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, importing whole beans, printing th...

Dandelion coffee is roasted dandelion root brewed into a dark, bitter drink, and the plant's use stretches back to the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans and more than a thousand years of traditional Chinese medicine. It became a coffee stand-in whenever real beans vanished. Confederate soldiers cut off by Union naval blockades during the American Civil War relied on it, and in 1852 Susanna Moo...

On April 19, 2017, Starbucks launched the Unicorn Frappuccino in select North American stores for a five-day run built for Instagram. It was a mango-flavored creme Frappuccino layered with milk, ice, whipped cream, and pink and blue sour powders, sold on the promise that a stir would shift it from purple to pink and from sweet to tangy. It arrived at the peak of the internet's pastel unicorn craze...

Yuenyeung is Hong Kong's answer to the coffee or tea question: brewed coffee mixed with Hong Kong-style milk tea, served hot or poured over ice. The milk tea alone is intense, built from a strong Ceylon blend of broken leaves and tea dust, sweetened and thickened with evaporated or condensed milk whose concentrated proteins bind the tea's tannins. The Hong Kong Leisure and Cultural Services Depart...

The moka pot is three pieces screwed together: a lower boiler with a safety valve, a funnel basket of fine grounds sealed by a rubber gasket and filter disc, and an upper collector. Heat raises the pressure of the air and steam trapped above the water, following Charles's law and the ideal gas law, and forces water up through the coffee bed, where Darcy's law describes its resistance, and into the...

Jerzy Franciszek Kulczycki was born in 1640 in the village of Kulczyce, in present day western Ukraine but then part of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, to an Orthodox Ruthenian noble family whose father had converted to Catholicism. He spoke Polish, Ruthenian, Serbian, Turkish, German, Hungarian, and Romanian, and worked in Belgrade as a translator for the Austrian Oriental Company. When Ottom...

Coffee palaces were grand hotels that refused to sell alcohol, an outgrowth of the temperance movement's campaign for total abstinence. The first attempt, Gerrit Smith's temperance hotel in Peterboro, New York, in 1826, failed. The idea found firmer ground in the United Kingdom from the 1830s, where coffee taverns were built to the size of a local pub with the same meeting rooms, entertainment, ch...

Brazil's coffee story is traced to 1727, when Francisco de Melo Palheta, sent to arbitrate a border dispute in French Guiana, left with seeds hidden in a bouquet from the governor's wife. Brazil now grows about a third of the world's coffee, over 2.7 million tons in 2011, mostly in Minas Gerais, São Paulo, and Espírito Santo, where altitude and a distinct wet and dry season suit the plant. The fir...

Giovanni Giotta was born in 1920 in Rovigno d'Istria, a fishing town that was part of Italy before World War II and now belongs to Croatia. After the region was ceded to Yugoslavia he lived as a displaced person in Monfalcone from 1947 to 1951, then emigrated to San Francisco with his family, arriving with no money, no food, and nowhere to sleep. Priests at Saints Peter and Paul Church found a fam...

On December 29, 1720, Floriano Francesconi opened a two room coffee shop under the Procuratie Nuove in Piazza San Marco and named it Alla Venezia Trionfante, though everyone simply called it Florian. It was one of the only coffeehouses in Venice that let women inside, which drew Giacomo Casanova, and one of the few places to buy Gasparo Gozzi's early newspaper, the Gazzetta Veneta, putting commute...