Coffee Culture
Coffee is older than the machines that make it and most of what is interesting about it happened before electricity. The Ethiopian ceremony, the Turkish sand tray, the Arabic dallah, the goat herder who probably never existed. These are the practices that survived, and what they tell you about how the drink is supposed to taste.
What Is Torrefacto Coffee?
Sugar added to the beans during roasting, where it caramelises and then burns. A Spanish tradition born of scarcity that never went away.
Coffee Slang: A Glossary of Cafe and Barista Terms
The words on a cafe menu and the words baristas use behind it are two different vocabularies. Here is what both of them mean.
Café de Olla: Mexico's Clay Pot Coffee
Coffee simmered with unrefined cane sugar and cinnamon in an earthenware pot. The clay is not decoration, and the sugar goes in before brewing.
Kiva Han and the First Coffee House
Constantinople, 1475. What opened there was not a shop that sold coffee but a new kind of public room, and the authorities noticed.
Fika: What Sweden Actually Means By It
Not a coffee break. A scheduled pause, usually twice a day, that the working day is built around rather than interrupted by.
Caffè Sospeso: The Suspended Coffee
Pay for two, drink one, leave one waiting for whoever needs it. A Neapolitan habit that turns out to be harder to export than it looks.
Turkish Sand Coffee: Why the Sand Is Not a Gimmick
Brewing a cezve buried in hot sand is theatre in a tourist cafe and genuine technique everywhere else. The sand does something no burner can.
The Ethiopian Coffee Ceremony: Buna, and Why It Takes an Hour
Green beans roasted in front of you, ground by hand, brewed in a clay jebena and served three times. The length is the point, not a side effect.
Kopi Luwak: What It Is, and Why We Do Not Recommend Buying It
The most expensive coffee in the world is produced by an animal, graded by novelty, and almost impossible to verify. All three are problems.
The Story of Kaldi and the Dancing Goats
Coffee's origin myth is charming, universally repeated, and first written down about nine hundred years after it supposedly happened.
Arabic Coffee: Qahwa, Cardamom and the Rules of the Cup
Pale, barely roasted, heavily spiced and served in a way that carries instructions. Almost nothing about it matches what the word coffee suggests.
Greek Coffee vs Turkish Coffee
The same method, the same pot, and a naming dispute with real history behind it. The differences in the cup are small and not zero.
The Dallah: The Coffee Pot on the Coinage
A long curved spout, a hinged lid and a shape recognisable across the Arab world. It is a brewing vessel and a symbol of hospitality, in that order of importance to nobody.
Armenian Coffee: Soorj, and the Cup Read Afterwards
The same regional method under another name, with one tradition attached to it more tenaciously than anywhere else: what the grounds say when the cup is turned over.