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Union soldiers in the American Civil War were issued Essence of Coffee, a gritty paste they compared to axle grease. This episode follows how that sludge became a $34 billion industry. David Strang of New Zealand patented a dry hot air process, Satoru Kato showed a powdered coffee at the 1901 Pan American Exposition, and George Constant Lewis Washington put a product on shelves in 1910, but his po...

About 60 percent of the world's coffee comes from Coffea arabica, yet in the wild it is classified as endangered, surviving in shrinking mountain forests of South Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Yemen. Arabica arose between roughly 543,000 and over a million years ago when Coffea canephora, known as Robusta, crossed with Coffea eugenioides in East Africa. Instead of a sterile offspring, the new plant b...

In 1752 Egbert Douwes opened a grocery called De Witte Os, the White Ox, in the Dutch town of Joure. In 1780 he handed it to his eldest son, Douwe Egberts, whose name the company still carries, and who narrowed the shop to coffee, tea, and tobacco. In 1925 the firm introduced a red seal with the initials DE as a guarantee of quality, and it named a tobacco brand White Ox after the original store....

Ludwig Roselius, born in Bremen in 1874, founded Café HAG in 1906 on a process that steamed green coffee beans in brine, opened their pores, and washed out the caffeine with benzene. He poured the fortune into avant-garde art, backing Paula Modersohn-Becker and sculptor Bernhard Hoetger, and from 1902 turned Böttcherstraße in Bremen into a brick expressionist work of art, adding his Glockenspiel h...

Murad IV was born in Constantinople in 1612 to Sultan Ahmed I and Kösem Sultan, and grew up in the kafes, or cage, the windowless palace apartments where princes lived under guard, never knowing whether the next visitor was a servant or an executioner. He became sultan at 11 in 1623, with his mother as regent, as the Safavids seized Ottoman Iraq, revolts spread in Anatolia, and the 1625 Bayram Pas...

Turkish coffee leaves the grounds in the cup. Arabica beans are roasted in a shallow iron pan, cooled in a walnut box that wicks away surface oil, and ground to a powder of 75 to 125 microns. Water, coffee, and sugar go into a tapered copper cezve and are pulled from the heat the moment a foam crust rises, sometimes flavored with cardamom, mastic, or ambergris. The drink began with Sufi mystics in...

The Café de Flore opened in the 1880s at the corner of Boulevard Saint-Germain and Rue Saint-Benoît in Paris, during the Third Republic, though its exact opening date is lost. Its poetic name came from a sculpture of Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers, standing across the boulevard. Early regulars included Joris-Karl Huysmans and Remy de Gourmont, and Charles Maurras wrote Au signe de Flore on it...

In 1991, computer scientists Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky at the University of Cambridge computer laboratory were tired of walking to the Trojan Room only to find the coffee pot empty. They aimed a 128 by 128 pixel grayscale camera at it, wired it to a video capture card in an Acorn Archimedes, and split the software: Jardetzky wrote the server that grabbed frames, and Stafford-Frase...

Edward Lloyd, born around 1648, opened a coffee house on Tower Street in London in 1686, near the docks, as the city rebuilt from the Great Fire of 1666. He aimed it squarely at sailors, merchants, ship captains, and ship owners, and turned it into a clearinghouse for shipping news. Lloyd never wrote an insurance policy or owned a ship. Instead, merchants passed slips describing a ship and cargo a...

Peter Schlumbohm was a German chemist who arrived in the United States in the 1930s and died in 1962 at 66 with around 300 patents, from cocktail shakers to a refrigerated garbage can. He called his philosophy beautility, the belief that a perfectly engineered object would be beautiful on its own. In 1941 he founded the Chemex Corporation in Chicopee, Massachusetts, to fix the American morning cup...

In 2024 Vogue predicted the espresso martini's reign was ending and named the carajillo as the caffeinated cocktail to replace it. The carajillo is simply coffee combined with a spirit, often served in a small glass with a cinnamon stick or lemon peel, and it has no fixed recipe. Its origins are murky but tied to Cuba, where coffee and sugarcane shared the same climate and labor, making rum the na...

At the World Barista Championship, national champions get 15 minutes to serve 12 drinks to four sensory judges: four espressos, four milk beverages, and four signature beverages, while a technical judge who never tastes a drop watches for flushed group heads, wasted grams, and stray grounds. In a representative year like 2018, 55 national champions entered, the top 15 plus a wild card reached the...

Kona coffee grows only in a narrow belt between 500 and 3,200 feet on the western slopes of Hualalai and Mauna Loa on Hawaii's Big Island, where sunny mornings, afternoon clouds, and porous volcanic soil suit Arabica brought from Brazil by Reverend Samuel Ruggles in 1828. When world coffee prices collapsed in 1899, plantation owners leased 5 to 12 acre parcels to their workers, mostly Japanese lab...

Eduard Douwes Dekker was a career Dutch colonial administrator in the Dutch East Indies, where the state had taken over from the bankrupt Dutch East India Company and ran the cultivation system, forcing farmers to grow coffee, sugar, and indigo instead of rice, alongside a state opium monopoly marked with a chemical tracer. Posted as assistant resident to Lebak after his predecessor Slotering like...

During World War II, the Manhattan Project gave radioactive polonium the code name Postum, after a caffeine-free breakfast drink of roasted wheat bran and molasses. That drink began in 1895 with C.W. Post, a sick man who had absorbed John Harvey Kellogg's anti-caffeine teachings at the Battle Creek sanitarium and saw a market in Victorian anxiety over neurasthenia. Post sold Postum as a cure for a...

The plaque on the Café Procope in Paris calls it the oldest continually operating cafe in the world, but the record says otherwise. Its founder, Sicilian chef Procopio Cutò, started as apprentice to an Armenian named Pascal, who sold lemonade and gritty boiled coffee from a wooden stall on a muddy Paris street until the venture collapsed in 1675 and he fled to London. Procopio diagnosed an image p...

Near midnight on March 16, 1792, King Gustav III of Sweden was handed an anonymous letter at a masquerade ball in the Royal Opera House in Stockholm, the building he had built himself. It warned that assassins were waiting on the dance floor. He folded it up and walked into the crowd anyway. Born in 1746 during the Age of Liberty, when the Riksdag even appointed his tutors, Gustav was taught by hi...

The cezve is the small, lidless Turkish coffee pot with a wide base, narrow neck, pouring lip, and a handle often longer than the pot is tall. It is traditionally hammered from copper or brass, occasionally silver or gold for the wealthy, because copper spreads heat fast and evenly and keeps powder-fine grounds from scorching. The long handle made sense before stovetops, when the pot was buried in...

The popular story says American GIs in World War II Italy thinned espresso with hot water, and Italian baristas mockingly named it. The linguistic record says otherwise. Research connected to the Oxford English Dictionary traces caffè americano to Central American Spanish of the mid-1950s, a decade after the war, where it was a derisive term for the weak, diluted coffee preferred by American visit...

The legend is cinematic: a French naval officer crossing the Atlantic in 1720, fresh water running out, sharing his own ration with a fragile coffee plant. Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu, born around 1687 near Dieppe, was no eccentric gardener. He governed Guadeloupe from 1737 to 1752, founded the city of Pointe-à-Pitre, and was made a commander of the Royal and Military Order of Saint Louis. His plant...

Jim Jarmusch's 2003 anthology Coffee and Cigarettes is 11 standalone black and white vignettes shot over 17 years, tied together only by caffeine, nicotine, and a black and white checkerboard pattern that appears on a tabletop or floor in every scene. It began in 1986 with Roberto Benigni and Steven Wright, who pitches caffeine popsicles for kids and drinks coffee before bed so his dreams run at t...

The cat cafe did not start in Brooklyn. The first, Cat Flower Garden, opened in Taipei, Taiwan in 1998 and became a tourist draw, but Japan turned the idea into an industry: Osaka's Neko no Jikan opened in 2004, Tokyo followed a year later, and the country now has more than 300. The driver was real estate. Young, overworked corporate employees packed into small city apartments whose leases banned...

Paper cups date to imperial China around the second century BC, where decorated cups called chih pei served tea to families like the Yu of Hangzhou. Their modern version came from fear. In early 1900s America, schools, offices, and train stations shared a single glass or tin dipper at the water barrel. After germ theory took hold, Lafayette College biology professor Alvin Davison published Death i...

Oatly began not as a rebel brand but as food science. In 1994 at Lund University in Sweden, a food scientist and his brother, working under a company formed with a cereals group, developed an enzymatic process that snips oat starches into simple sugars and releases beta-glucans, the soluble fiber that gives the drink its creamy body. The first product did not reach shelves until 2001, made in Land...

The cappuccino's name has nothing to do with foam looking like a monk's shaved head. It comes from the brown robes of Capuchin friars. In the late 1700s, Viennese coffee houses under the Habsburg monarchy served the Kapuziner, black coffee with a few drops of cream to match that shade, alongside the lighter Franziskaner for the Franciscans. The drink passed into Italian through the port of Trieste...