03 Sep 2026Wood, cork or stone: what to bang your cup on
Stone is the most durable surface in most kitchens and the worst one to work coffee on. It will chip the foot of a cup you like, pass every knock s...
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Notes on coffee, the objects it is made with, and what we will not sell you.
03 Sep 2026What Acidity Means in Coffee
The word arrives on a bag as praise and lands on most people as a warning. Roasters print high acidity meaning something closer to lively. Plenty o...
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01 Sep 2026The Thermal Carafe Rule: Never a Hot Plate
A warming plate buys you something nothing else in the kitchen buys. Coffee brewed at seven that is still hot at nine, with no attention paid in be...
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01 Sep 2026Two books, ninety-seven years apart, caught inventing the same myth
Put a 1922 coffee book and a 2019 coffee book side by side and the same small cast of characters walks through both: a goatherd, a saint in exile, ...
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01 Sep 2026Vienna's coffee statue honours the wrong man
A trade guild does not commission a statue to record what happened. It commissions one to establish who it descends from. That distinction is the w...
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29 Aug 2026The Genetic Bottleneck Under Your Morning Cup
Arabica pollinates itself. It does not need an insect to set fruit, which is why the "save the bees, save your coffee" line is wrong about arabica ...
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29 Aug 2026The man who invented the coffee legend about himself
A young French naval officer crosses the Atlantic with a coffee seedling in his care. Water runs short. He gives the plant half of his own ration, ...
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29 Aug 2026Turkish Coffee: The Only Method With No Filter at All
A pot, a heat source, a cup. No paper, no plunger, no basket, no pump, no pressure. That is the shortest equipment list in coffee and it is the rea...
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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 2026Sixty Degrees: The Milk Temperature Argument, Settled
The person asking for their latte extra hot is not being difficult and is not ignorant. They have a real complaint, which is that the drink they pa...
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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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25 Aug 2026Linen, cotton, and what the weave does to body
A cloth filter is the only part of a brewing kit that can spoil while nobody is touching it. Leave one to dry on the edge of the sink over a weeken...
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