Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchThe Bicerin of Turin: Three Unmixed Layers in a Small Glass Since the 1700s
Episode 12458
The bicerin, native to Turin in Italy's Piedmont region, has been served since the 18th century and is built from three ingredients: espresso, ganach…
4 days, 17 hours ago
Home Coffee Roasting: 1700s Lead Powder Fraud to Heat-Gun Bread Machines
Episode 12457
Roasting coffee at home once meant standing over a brazier with a thin, perforated metal or porcelain pan, as people did in the Ottoman Empire and Pe…
4 days, 17 hours ago
Espresso Machine Boiler Wars: Gaggia's Lever, the Faema E61, and Nine Bars
Episode 12456
Espresso began as a speed problem. In 1884 Angelo Moriondo of Turin patented a steam-driven device to serve coffee fast, but a closed boiler ties pre…
4 days, 17 hours ago
The Affogato Debate: Dessert in Rome, Beverage in New York, Born Nameless
Episode 12455
Affogato al caffè means drowned in coffee, and the traditional version is just a scoop of vanilla or fior di latte gelato under a freshly pulled shot…
4 days, 17 hours ago
Siphon Coffee Physics: 1.5 Kilopascals, Belgian Balance Pots, Bauhaus Glass
Episode 12454
The vacuum coffee maker, also called a siphon or vac pot, moves water with no pump and no moving parts. Heat under the sealed lower globe expands tra…
4 days, 17 hours ago
J.A. Folger's Gold Rush Hedge: Nantucket's Whale Oil Bust to a Coffee Mill
Episode 12453
In 1850 a 15-year-old J.A. Folger left Nantucket, where cheap kerosene was killing the whale oil trade, and headed to California with his two older b…
4 days, 17 hours ago
Dalgona Coffee's Real Origin: A Macau Shipwright's Hand-Beaten Brew
Episode 12452
The whipped coffee that filled kitchens during the spring 2020 lockdowns began decades earlier with Leong Kam Hon, a shipwright in Macau whose shipya…
4 days, 17 hours ago
Latte Art's Hidden Physics: David Schomer's Rosetta and Lupi's Belt System
Episode 12451
Latte art is drawn on a canvas that is falling apart. Crema is an emulsion of coffee oils and trapped carbon dioxide that starts off-gassing the inst…
4 days, 17 hours ago
Peaberry Coffee: The 5% Single-Seed Caracolillo and the Rolling Myth
Episode 12450
A coffee cherry normally holds two seeds that press against each other as they grow, like two passengers sharing an airplane armrest, which is why mo…
4 days, 17 hours ago
Jay Sorensen's Java Jacket: A Drive-Thru Coffee Spill and the Paper Zarf
Episode 12449
The corrugated cardboard ring slipped onto a hot coffee cup began with one bad morning in 1991. Jay Sorensen, whose career had stalled after a run of…
4 days, 17 hours ago