Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchIndonesian Coffee: VOC Monopoly, Max Havelaar, and Wet-Hulled Sumatra
Episode 12301
Coffee is not native to Indonesia. In 1696 the Dutch governor in Malabar sent Arabica seedlings, originally from Yemen, to Batavia, now Jakarta, wher…
3 days, 7 hours ago
Ethiopian Coffee: The Starbucks Trademark Fight and a 70% Yield Warning
Episode 12300
Legend credits a ninth century goat herder named Kaldi in Ethiopia's Kaffa region with discovering coffee after his goats ate red berries and began t…
3 days, 7 hours ago
A German Rum Coffee Lawsuit, the Flat Red, and the Wayne Gretzky Order
Episode 12299
In 1981 a court in Flensburg, Germany ruled that a Pharisee coffee must contain at least two centiliters of rum hidden under its whipped cream, or th…
3 days, 7 hours ago
The Cortado: Spain's Cut Espresso, Cuban Cortadito, and the Gibraltar
Episode 12298
Cortado is the past participle of the Spanish verb cortar, to cut. In Spain the drink is espresso cut with a roughly equal amount of warm, steamed mi…
3 days, 7 hours ago
Jonathan's Coffee House: Treason Plots and the Birth of the Stock Exchange
Episode 12297
In the 1680s Jonathan Miles opened a coffee house in Exchange Alley in the City of London. For a penny, anyone could get a dish of coffee, newspapers…
3 days, 7 hours ago
Coffea Genus Secrets: Not a Bean, 133 Species, and a Caffeine-Free Find
Episode 12296
The coffee plant is a shrub or small tree about three to three and a half meters tall, and its red or purple fruit is botanically an epigynous berry …
3 days, 7 hours ago
Coffee Table Books: Montaigne's Complaint to Madonna's Sex and Blade Runner
Episode 12295
In 1581 Michel de Montaigne complained in his essay Upon Some Verses of Virgil that readers treated his books as common moveables, laid out in parlor…
3 days, 7 hours ago
Melitta Bentz to the ISS Espresso: How Coffee Makers Actually Work
Episode 12294
Every coffee maker runs on gravity or pressure. An automatic drip machine lifts water with a thermosiphon: an aluminum tube around a heating element …
3 days, 7 hours ago
Robusta's Caffeine Arsenal: Crema, Leaf Rust, and Vietnam's Export Rise
Episode 12293
Coffea canephora, known as Robusta, is native to western and central sub Saharan Africa from Liberia to Tanzania and south to Angola. In the wild it …
3 days, 7 hours ago
The Coffee Ring Effect: Spill Physics Behind Printed Microchips
Episode 12292
The brown ring a coffee drop leaves on a countertop comes from capillary flow. The thin edge of the drop evaporates faster than the center, but it st…
3 days, 7 hours ago