03 Oct 2026Thirty-Six Aromas in a Box
Most people assume a nose is issued, not built: you are either someone who catches the apricot in a coffee or you are not, and no amount of effort ...
Read the setupGrounds
Notes on coffee, the objects it is made with, and what we will not sell you.
03 Oct 2026What Is a Microlot?
Ten bags. That is the working size of a microlot in James Hoffmann's The World Atlas of Coffee: typically ten export sacks of 60 or 69 kg or fewer,...
Read the setup
03 Oct 2026What Are Past Crop and Current Crop?
Coffee ages on two separate clocks, and the words on this page belong to the slower one. Current crop, also called new or fresh crop, is green coff...
Read the setup
01 Oct 2026The Royalty Ethiopia Chose Not to Charge
In 2007, after a two-year fight, Ethiopia won legal ownership of three of the most valuable words in coffee: Sidamo, Harar and Yirgacheffe. Then it...
Read the setup
01 Oct 2026The Sultan Who Ordered Coffee Shop Owners Hanged Over Their Own Doors
The harshest anti-coffee law ever recorded says nothing against coffee. In 1633, after a fire destroyed five districts of Istanbul, Sultan Murad IV...
Read the setup
01 Oct 2026The Penny University, and What a Dish of Coffee Was
For its first decades in England, coffee was not served in a cup. It came in a bowl. The mistake most retellings make is treating that as decorativ...
Read the setup
29 Sep 2026The Grinder That Was Made in Constantinople and Sold Across Greece
Stand in a Greek kitchen in 1922 and the most precise instrument in the house is probably the coffee mill: a slim brass cylinder, hand-cranked, tha...
Read the setup
29 Sep 2026The Gujarati Merchants Who Financed the World's First Coffee Farms
The standard cast of early coffee history has two groups in it: Arab growers and traders on one side, European trading companies arriving on the ot...
Read the setup
29 Sep 2026The de Belloy Pot: The Flip-Over Brewer That Started Drip Coffee
Espresso has a birthday and a plaque. The moka pot has a company and an anniversary logo. Drip coffee, the method most of the world actually uses, ...
Read the setup
26 Sep 2026The Country That Made Coffee Planting Compulsory
In 1724 the French East India Company debated whether deliberately damaging a coffee tree should carry the death penalty. What it actually decreed ...
Read the setup
26 Sep 2026Switzerland Is the Biggest Coffee Exporter by Value, and Grows None
In 2010 the world's largest exporter of roasted coffee, measured by value, was Switzerland. By volume it ranked only fifth. The country has no coff...
Read the setup
26 Sep 2026The 1908 Melitta Patent Was a Brass Pot, Not a Cone
Picture the object the name Melitta calls up. It is a cone. Ridged plastic or porcelain with a folded paper filter inside, sitting on a mug. Now ho...
Read the setup