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In 1993 David Crane and Marta Kauffman, with Kevin Bright, had just seen CBS cancel Family Album when they pitched NBC a seven page treatment about six people in their twenties in Manhattan, under the working title Insomnia Cafe. Cameron Crowe has said Warner Bros. Television wanted to adapt his 1992 film Singles and used its premise when he declined, which the network and creators dispute. Castin...

Four Loko started with three recent Ohio State graduates, Chris Hunter, Jason Freeman, and Jeff Wright, who had mixed drinks in their Kappa Sigma house and resold Thai energy drinks bought at a local Asian market. In 2005 they formed Fusion Projects in Chicago and launched an energy beer in cherry and berry, named for four active ingredients: caffeine, taurine, guarana, and wormwood. Short on cash...

The stroopwafel began as a way to sell waste. In Gouda, bakers took crumbs and trimmings, sweetened them with the cheapest syrup available, and pressed them into waffles. The name most tied to it is Gerard Kamphuisen, who opened a bakery in Gouda in 1810, and the oldest known written recipe dates to 1840. The method is exacting: a dense yeast dough with butter, brown sugar, milk, and eggs is press...

In 2018 cafes across Europe and North America ran short of oat milk, a product whose commercial form came out of Lund University in Sweden in the early 1990s. Food scientist Rickard Oste was studying lactose intolerance and sustainable food, chose oats because they were abundant locally, and founded Oatly. The hard part was physics: oats are 50 to 60 percent starch, and heating a slurry for shelf...

Canadian entrepreneur Blake Dinkin wanted an animal to process coffee without the caged, force fed civets behind kopi luwak. He ruled out lions for their acidic carnivore guts and giraffes because a ruminant's four chambered stomach would leave nothing of the bean. Elephants fit: in Southeast Asia's dry season they already eat coffee cherries. His early batches were unsavory, and it took nine year...

The maid cafe look began before any maid cafe existed. In 1979 the family restaurant chain Anna Miller's introduced a waitress uniform with a white blouse, a pink or orange jumper, an apron, and a heart shaped name tag. Otaku culture absorbed it through the 1993 video game Variable Geo, the 1996 manga Welcome to Pia Carrot, and the webcomic Megatokyo, and in March 2001 Cure Maid Cafe opened in Aki...

The best known coffee origin story is set around 850 CE, when a goatherd named Kaldi, placed in Ethiopia or Arabia, sees his goats dancing after eating red berries from an unfamiliar bush. He tries them, feels a rush of energy, and brings them to a Sufi monastery, where the head monk calls them the devil's work and throws them into the fire. The smell of roasting beans changes his mind. The monks...

In 1947 in Philadelphia, two former servicemen, Lloyd K. Rudd and K.C. Melikian, built the first automated hot coffee vending machine, a Quick Cafe spelled with Ks. Established vendors selling soda and gumballs wanted no part of it, fearing scalds, electrical shorts, rust, and steam that turned stored instant powder into a solid brick. Rudd and Melikian kept the dry powder away from the splash zon...

Coffee milk, cold milk sweetened with coffee syrup, is a fixture of Rhode Island. Its roots lie with the roughly 55,000 Italian immigrants who arrived in Providence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, bringing a habit of sweet coffee with milk. Soda fountain operators turned it into a commercial product by boiling leftover coffee grounds with milk and sugar into a shelf stable syrup. By the...

Wild Coffea arabica evolved in Ethiopia, but a 2020 genetic study found that nearly all cultivated arabica worldwide descends from a narrow group of plants first farmed in Yemen. The word coffee runs through Ottoman Turkish kahve to Arabic qahwa, a term medieval lexicographers linked to wine. The goatherd Kaldi story first appeared in print only in 1671, and the credible record begins with 15th ce...

Specialty coffee lives or dies on a 100 point scale: certified Q graders score green coffee, and anything under 80 goes to commercial blends. This episode traces how coffee reached that level of scrutiny through three waves. The first wave was vacuum canned, pre ground, often robusta coffee like Folgers and Maxwell House. The second began in the late 1960s with Peet's in Berkeley and inspired Star...

Cichorium intybus, common chicory, is the tough, blue flowered weed growing out of highway medians, and it grows up to about a meter and a half tall and regrows from a low rosette after mowing. Its bitterness comes from lactucin and lactucopicrin, defensive compounds that cooks leach out by boiling the leaves. Selective breeding turned the same species into radicchio, with protected Italian types...

Café du Monde has served nearly the same menu from its open air stand on Decatur Street in the French Quarter since 1862: dark roasted coffee with chicory, black or au lait, and beignets, plus milk, hot chocolate, and orange juice. It sits at the upriver end of the French Market in the old Butcher's Hall, on ground where the Spanish built in 1791 and the city rebuilt in 1813 after an 1812 hurrican...

Café Touba is a Senegalese coffee roasted together with djar, the dried fruit of Xylopia aethiopica, also called grains of Selim or Guinea pepper. The usual ratio is about 80 percent coffee to 20 percent spice, sometimes with cloves, and roasting them together fuses the spice oils into the beans before grinding. The drink is named for the holy city of Touba, whose name means felicity or blessednes...

In 1895 Luigi Lavazza opened a small grocery at Via San Tommaso 10 in Turin, and the company credits him with inventing the coffee blend. By mixing beans from different regions, he could keep flavor steady even when one harvest turned out bitter or thin, and the ratios became a proprietary recipe. Today Luigi Lavazza SpA, run by the third and fourth generations, is bought by roughly 16 million of...

Alfred Peet was born in 1920 in Alkmaar in the Netherlands, where his father ran a coffee and tea business and young Alfred roasted and ground beans. In 1938 he moved to London to work for Twinings, then spent time in producing regions including New Zealand and Indonesia before settling in San Francisco in 1955. What he found in America was weak, sour robusta coffee, pre ground and left on diner h...

In 2004 Alan Adler, a retired Stanford engineering lecturer already famous for the Aerobie flying ring, got fed up with bitter coffee and treated it as an engineering problem. He wanted control over three variables: water temperature, grind size, and contact time. Drip machines run water near boiling, which pulls out bitter compounds, while French presses and pour overs leave too much to chance. H...

Whenever coffee supplies collapse, people roast whatever they can find. After Napoleon's Continental Blockade of 1806 cut France off from imports, the French turned to roasted chicory root. During the American Civil War, the Union blockade left Southerners brewing rye, okra seeds, and chopped sweet potatoes, and in 1865 the Southern Banner admitted the goal was cheating the palate if we cannot dec...

In 1674 a group of English women petitioned against coffee, claiming it left their husbands idle, gossiping, and impotent. That picture of coffee as a waste of time stands against its modern role as workplace fuel, and this episode follows the drink between those poles. It starts with Sufi mystics in Yemen using coffee for night long dhikr, a ban by religious leaders in Mecca, and a fatwa from the...

The coffeehouse began with Sufi monks in 15th century Yemen, who drank coffee to stay awake through all night dhikr chanting. The Arabic word kahwa had originally referred to a type of wine. In 1555 two merchants from Aleppo and Damascus opened a shop in Istanbul's Tahtakale district, and Ottoman coffeehouses soon filled with chess, backgammon, storytellers, and open political debate. Authorities...

Biscotti began as survival food. The name comes from the medieval Latin biscoctus, meaning twice cooked, and the second bake pulled out nearly all moisture so the bread would not mold. Roman soldiers, medieval sailors, crusaders, and monks relied on it for long journeys and winters. The English word biscuit shares the root, yet today's biscuits are baked once, and in modern Italian biscotti simply...

The greasy spoon feels like a 20th century American invention of neon, chrome, and Formica, but the idea of naming a cheap eatery after dirty silverware goes back to at least 1848. In Rome, a tavern called the Gabione, popular with German visitors on the Grand Tour, was so murky that its patrons nicknamed it the dirty spoon. The English phrase greasy spoon first appears in print in 1906 in Macmill...

Coffee was likely first discovered in Ethiopia, but it became a ritual in Turkey around the 13th century, with a formality compared to tea ceremonies in China and Japan and a role in hospitality and diplomacy. It was served in small handleless cups called fincan, and to protect the drinker's fingers the cup sat inside a zarf, from the Arabic for container or envelope, plural zuruf, zarflar in Turk...

In Italian, barista means bartender, and a traditional Italian barista runs the whole counter, serving espresso in the morning and cocktails, wine, and snacks in the evening. Italian plurals follow gender, baristi and bariste, while English and Spanish simply added an s and narrowed the job to espresso. That drink is demanding: water at about nine bars is forced through a dosed, distributed, and t...

Around 850 AD, the story goes, the Ethiopian goat herder Kaldi noticed his goats dancing after eating red cherries. The bean inside is a seed made mostly of endosperm, usually two to a cherry, and in 10 to 15% of cherries a single peaberry, whose premium likely reflects careful sorting more than any proven flavor edge. The word coffee came into English from the Italian caffè around 1600, from Turk...