Notes on coffee, the objects it is made with, and what we will not sell you.
The rise of the London coffee house is one of the most retold stories in the history of the drink. The fall is barely told at all, which is strange...
Read the setupThere is a satirical print by Thomas Rowlandson, dated 1809, showing the inside of a London coffee house. Jonathan Morris reproduces it in Coffee: ...
Read the setupSomewhere in the last bag of naturally processed coffee you bought, there was probably a bean the colour of milky tea sitting in a crowd of brown o...
Read the setupIn February 2013, more than half a million Colombian coffee growers went on strike, blockading highways across the country. Coffee prices at the ti...
Read the setupThe most recognised coffee farmer in history never picked a cherry. Juan Valdez, the moustached grower who appeared beside his mule on bags and in ...
Read the setupA cup of kopi luwak in New York was selling for around $30 as of 2019, and the bagged coffee for upwards of $100 a pound, figures Jonathan Morris r...
Read the setupMost writing about coffee ethics rests on an unstated assumption: the customer is in the North. The shopper weighing labels in Berlin or Boston is ...
Read the setupRoughly one person in four is wired to experience certain bitter compounds at an intensity the rest of the table never receives, and a sizeable sha...
Read the setupA café serves a customer in minutes and turns its tables several times an hour. That is the clock the whole business runs on, and it is what makes ...
Read the setupTiramisu recipes are precise about everything that does not decide the outcome. Grams of mascarpone, number of yolks, size of dish, brand of cocoa,...
Read the setup"Pumpkin spice" names the seasoning for a pie, not the squash inside it. McCormick has sold the blend under that name since 1934, decades before an...
Read the setupA coffee rub looks like a spice rub, so people cook it like one: straight over a hot grill, hard sear, the treatment that serves a pepper crust wel...
Read the setup