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...
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Notes on coffee, the objects it is made with, and what we will not sell you.
22 Sep 2026Higher Prices Are Often Bad News
In February 2013, more than half a million Colombian coffee growers went on strike, blockading highways across the country. Coffee prices at the ti...
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22 Sep 2026Juan Valdez Worked for a Government
The most recognised coffee farmer in history never picked a cherry. Juan Valdez, the moustached grower who appeared beside his mule on bags and in ...
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19 Sep 2026Brazil and China Are Becoming Coffee's Biggest Customers
Most writing about coffee ethics rests on an unstated assumption: the customer is in the North. The shopper weighing labels in Berlin or Boston is ...
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27 Aug 2026Ninety per cent Yemeni in 1721, ninety per cent Javan in 1726
Origin collapse is usually imagined as a disaster. A frost, a fungus, a war, a port closing: something visible that takes the trees out and leaves ...
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27 Aug 2026The 1912 court case that decided what "Mocha" is allowed to mean
There is a word on café menus everywhere that now means chocolate, used to mean a Yemeni port, and for about two hundred years meant "coffee good e...
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20 Aug 2026It took six months to fill one ship at Mocha
The slow part of the early coffee trade was not the sea. A ship under sail could work the Red Sea, round the Cape and reach a French port inside a ...
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15 Aug 2026Brazil burned 80 million bags of coffee and fed the rest to locomotives
A surplus sounds like a gift if you are standing at the drinking end of it. More coffee, cheaper coffee, better coffee for the same money. That is ...
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08 Aug 2026Single Origin Means Less Than You Think
The phrase carries a real cost and almost nobody is told what it is. Buy a coffee sold this way and you get something that tastes like one place in...
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08 Aug 2026Read the bag: valve, roast date, farm, variety, process
A coffee bag is two documents printed on the same surface. One of them is advertising, written by someone whose job is to make you pick it up. The ...
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08 Aug 2026Nine Months on the Branch: Why Coffee Has Seasons
A roaster who has your favourite Ethiopian on the shelf every week of the year is not being more reliable than the one who runs out. They are doing...
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05 Aug 2026The Altitude Squeeze
You have almost certainly seen the number: half the land suitable for coffee will be gone by 2050. It appears in newspapers, on café chalkboards, i...
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