pplpod

The coffee berry borer, Hypothenemus hampei, is a beetle about the size of a pinhead, with females reaching only 1.8 millimeters, yet it is the most destructive coffee pest on Earth and threatens the income of more than 20 million families. It skips the leaves and roots and goes straight for the seed. Between 8 and 32 weeks after flowering, a female drills into a developing coffee cherry, carves g...

Luckin Coffee was founded in Beijing in October 2017 and opened its first shops in Beijing and Shanghai in January 2018, cashless, app-only, and heavily discounted, spending about three times what it earned to buy growth like a software startup. A $200 million Series A in July 2018 brought in Centurium Capital and GIC, and by October 2018 Luckin had 1,300 stores, passing Costa Coffee as China's se...

Kenya grows Arabica that trades under the Colombian Milds category, a market shorthand for high-quality washed arabica. Its highland plateaus around Mount Kenya, the Aberdare Range, Kisii, Nyanza, Bungoma, Nakuru, Mount Elgon, and the Taita Hills sit between 1,400 and 2,000 meters on red volcanic soil rich in phosphoric acid, and cool nights slow the cherries' ripening so beans pack in sugars and...

In 1991 a Sun Microsystems engineer working on how different computers could talk to each other named his project Oak, after a tree outside the office window. Trademark trouble forced a new name, and the team picked Java, after the Indonesian coffee they were drinking. When Java debuted publicly in 1996, it answered a real mess: every processor and operating system needed its own compiled version...

Kissaten translates literally as tea-drinking shop, yet the word names Japan's century-old coffee sanctuary. Tokyo's first cafe opened in 1888 as a showcase of Western modernity, complete with leather chairs and billiards. By the 1920s, as Tokyo industrialized and a class of young urban workers filled the streets, cafes had turned into loud venues serving alcohol, with jazz playing and waitresses...

Howard Schultz was born in Brooklyn in 1953 and raised in the Canarsie public housing projects, a place some peers later called the country club of projects but which he described as a poverty he burned to escape. A football scholarship took him to Northern Michigan University in 1971, an injury ended that path, and after graduating in 1975 he sold for Xerox and then ran the US arm of a Swedish ki...

Cold brew is not iced coffee with better marketing. Iced coffee is brewed hot and then chilled or poured over ice, and as it cools its chlorogenic acids break down into quinic and caffeic acids that taste harsh and stale. Cold brew never touches hot water: coarse grounds steep in cool or room-temperature water for 12 to 24 hours, then get filtered through paper, a metal sieve, or felt into a conce...

The work break was fought for, not handed out. At the 1903 Brussels International Congress of Hygiene and Demography, researchers began treating industrial fatigue as a measurable hazard tied to monotony, alcohol, and accidents rather than a personal moral failing. During World War I, Oxford physiologist A.F. Stanley Kent, sent by the UK Home Office to test a mid-shift tea break at a munitions fac...

In Addis Ababa there is a restaurant built in the shape of a giant clay coffee pot, and that pot is the jebena, the traditional brewing flask of Ethiopia and Eritrea. Standing roughly 20 to 45 centimeters tall, it has a flat circular base that balances on hot coals, a thick bulbous body that holds heat like a battery, and a narrow neck that works as a built-in strainer. Spouts mark origin: Ethiopi...

Order a latte in an Italian cafe and you may get a plain glass of milk, because latte simply means milk; you need caffè latte or caffè e latte. The drink itself is precise: one or more shots of espresso topped with steamed milk in a glass of about 230 milliliters, milder and milkier than a 140 milliliter cappuccino and without its stiff foam cap. The key is microfoam. A steam wand unfolds milk pro...

Alfonso Bialetti, born in 1888 in Piedmont, spent a decade in the French aluminum industry when the metal was still a serious material for aviation and rail. Back in Crusinallo in 1919 he opened a shell foundry, casting aluminum in reusable steel molds that gave the smooth, precise threads a pressurized pot needs. His first attempt carried the name Triple Rapid Miracle 900, and he refined it along...

For decades the price of coffee was set by fears of Nazi and communist influence in Latin America. When World War II and U-boat patrols sealed off European markets, coffee prices collapsed, and Washington worried that ruined economies in Brazil and Colombia would turn to hostile ideologies. The 1940 Inter-American Coffee Agreement capped U.S. imports at 15.9 million bags while producers limited ou...

The one rule that separates a liqueur from a liquor is added sugar. Liqueurs are spirits bottled with added flavors from fruits, herbs, or nuts plus sugar, usually 15 to 55 percent alcohol, and that sugar changes the viscosity, density, and mouthfeel of the liquid. The labels mislead constantly. A chocolate cream liqueur like Cadbury or Mozart contains real dairy, but the French crème in crème de...

When coffee reached 17th century England, doctors claimed it cured head melancholy, gout, and scurvy, and skeptics feared paralysis and heart failure, all in a country where unsafe water meant most people drank ale around the clock. In 1650 a Jewish entrepreneur named Jacob opened what is considered the first English coffee house at the Angel coaching inn in Oxford, moving coffee from the apotheca...

A café au lait is coffee with hot milk, and that heat is the rule: cold milk in coffee makes a white coffee. What separates it from a latte is the base. A latte is built on espresso extracted at nine bars of pressure in 25 to 30 seconds, while a café au lait uses strong brewed coffee from a drip machine or French press, giving a softer blend. Starbucks sells its version as the Caffè Misto, a fixed...

The cappuccino's name comes from the reddish-brown woolen robes of the Capuchin friars. In late 18th century Vienna, under the Habsburg monarchy, coffee houses served the Kapuziner, a brewed coffee with just enough cream to match that shade, and a lighter Franziskaner for the paler Franciscan habit. The drink moved south to Trieste, the Austrian-ruled free port that served as the Mediterranean's c...

In 17th century England untreated water could kill, so nearly everyone, from children to scholars, drank ale all day and lived in a mild haze. Then a bitter black drink arrived, first described by travelers who saw men in Asian and Arabian empires stay up talking all night. Early marketers sold coffee as a cure for gout, scurvy, smallpox, and head melancholy, a supposed cold, dry imbalance of the...

About 89 percent of American adults consume a drug that physically changes their brains, averaging roughly 200 milligrams a day. This episode works through the mechanism. As cells break down ATP for energy, they leave behind adenosine, which binds to A1 and A2A receptors and signals the body to slow down. Caffeine is a receptor antagonist: it fits those receptors without activating them, so the br...

Picture stepping off a Boeing 314 Clipper flying boat in County Clare in the early 1940s after some 15 hours in an unpressurized, freezing cabin. At the Foynes air base, about 15 kilometers from today's Shannon Airport, head chef Joe Sheridan handed battered transatlantic passengers a hot glass of coffee, Irish whiskey, sugar, and chilled cream. The coffee woke them, the whiskey warmed them, the s...

Ask for a Danish in Copenhagen and you get a blank stare. The Danes call it wienerbrød, Viennese bread, while in Vienna the same pastry is Kopenhagener Plunder. The explanation starts with an 1850 bakery strike in Denmark. Desperate owners brought in replacement workers, many from Austria, who carried their plunder pastry and the technique of Viennese lamination. When the strike ended, Danish bake...

Caribou Coffee exists because of a jealous neighbor. In the early 1990s John Puckett, a Bain & Company consultant in Boston, and his wife Kim decided on a trip to Alaska's Denali National Park to start a coffee company. The plan was pure efficiency: a weekday-only shop serving downtown office workers. Kim kept her job at General Motors to fund it while John signed a lease in the Pillsbury Cent...

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...