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Yuenyeung is Hong Kong's answer to the coffee or tea question: brewed coffee mixed with Hong Kong-style milk tea, served hot or poured over ice. The milk tea alone is intense, built from a strong Ceylon blend of broken leaves and tea dust, sweetened and thickened with evaporated or condensed milk whose concentrated proteins bind the tea's tannins. The Hong Kong Leisure and Cultural Services Department records the traditional ratio as three parts coffee to seven parts milk tea, a balance that keeps the roasted coffee from drowning out the tea. The name is the Cantonese word for mandarin ducks, a symbol of conjugal love, chosen because the vivid male and the mottled brown female look like opposites swimming as a pair.

The drink grew out of Hong Kong's 1950s street food scene, in open-air dai pai dong stalls and cheap cha chaan teng cafes where canned milk and tea dust kept costs down. Lam Muk Ho of Lan Fong Yuen, a stall that still operates, claims he invented yuenyeung in 1952, the same year he claims for silk stocking milk tea. Historians broadly credit him with the silk stocking method, but his yuenyeung claim remains unverified. The drink later spread across the city, crossed into Malaysia under another name, and even got a frozen corporate makeover.

• Silk stocking milk tea is pulled repeatedly through a long white cotton sack that stains the color of hosiery, straining, aerating, and smoothing the tea.
• Evaporated milk has about 60 percent of its water removed, which gives Hong Kong milk tea its velvety body.
• In summer 2010, Starbucks in Hong Kong and Macau sold a Yuenyeung Frappuccino Blended Cream.
• In Malaysia the same mix is called kopi cham, joining the Malay word for coffee with the Hokkien word for mix.
• Children's yuenyeung skips caffeine entirely, blending Horlicks and Ovaltine to mimic the light and dark pairing.

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The moka pot is three pieces screwed together: a lower boiler with a safety valve, a funnel basket of fine grounds sealed by a rubber gasket and filter disc, and an upper collector. Heat raises the pressure of the air and steam trapped above the water, following Charles's law and the ideal gas law, and forces water up through the coffee bed, where Darcy's law describes its resistance, and into the top chamber in a single pass. At one to two bar it is not espresso, which requires nine, and its coffee lands at about 3 to 4 percent dissolved solids, against 9 to 10 for espresso and about 2 for drip.

The principle traces to Romershausen's 1818 patent and Louis Bernard Rabaut's 1822 design, and in 1833 Middlesex coppersmith Samuel Parker patented the steam fountain, later known as the Vienna Incomparable, which set the vertical method. Alfonso Bialetti began selling the aluminum Moka Express in 1933 but sold relatively few before World War II; his son Renato's 1952 campaign with the mustached little man made it an Italian fixture, its design essentially unchanged since. When the boiler nearly empties, steam and water sputter up together in what researchers Navarini, Nobile, and colleagues named the Strombolian phase, overextracting bitter compounds, so the pot should come off the heat as the gurgle starts.

• Measured caffeine in moka coffee ranges from 128 to just under 540 milligrams per 100 milliliters.
• The Brikka adds a weighted valve on the nozzle that builds higher pressure and produces a layer of crema.
• The Mukka froths milk and mixes it with the coffee inside the same pot.
• In a broken in pot, aluminum migration falls below 1 percent of the weekly intake, but after a dishwasher strips the oxide layer it rose to nearly 4 percent.
• Moka pots are found in the Museum of Modern Art, the London Science Museum, and the Smithsonian.

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Jerzy Franciszek Kulczycki was born in 1640 in the village of Kulczyce, in present day western Ukraine but then part of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, to an Orthodox Ruthenian noble family whose father had converted to Catholicism. He spoke Polish, Ruthenian, Serbian, Turkish, German, Hungarian, and Romanian, and worked in Belgrade as a translator for the Austrian Oriental Company. When Ottoman authorities there rounded up suspected Austrian spies, he claimed Polish citizenship, since the Commonwealth was not then at war with the Ottomans, escaped to Vienna, and opened his own trading company in 1678.

In 1683, with Kara Mustafa Pasha's army besieging Vienna, Kulczycki and his Serbian servant George Mihailovic dressed in Turkish clothes and walked through the Ottoman camp singing Ottoman songs, reached Duke Charles of Lorraine, and slipped back in with word that relief was coming, which helped end talk of surrender. After John III Sobieski broke the siege on September 12, the city gave Kulczycki a cash reward and a house in Leopoldstadt, and he received sacks of captured coffee. The story that he then opened Vienna's first coffeehouse, the House Under the Blue Bottle, was invented by writer Gottfried Uhlich in 1783 for the siege's centenary.

• European soldiers took the abandoned coffee sacks for camel fodder, but Kulczycki knew what they were.
• In 1980 historian Karl Teply found in municipal records that the first coffee privilege went in 1685 to Armenian merchant Johannes Diodato.
• A Kulczycki descendant and historian rejected Teply's findings as pseudoscientific.
• An 1885 statue on Favoritenstrasse shows him in Turkish disguise pouring coffee, and a Vienna street bears his name.
• For decades Viennese café owners held an annual October feast in his honor and displayed his portrait in their windows.

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Coffee palaces were grand hotels that refused to sell alcohol, an outgrowth of the temperance movement's campaign for total abstinence. The first attempt, Gerrit Smith's temperance hotel in Peterboro, New York, in 1826, failed. The idea found firmer ground in the United Kingdom from the 1830s, where coffee taverns were built to the size of a local pub with the same meeting rooms, entertainment, cheap food, and lodging, and it grew into major architecture such as the French Renaissance Trevelyan Temperance Hotel in Leeds in 1872 and the Gothic revival Cobden Coffee Palace in Birmingham in 1883.

At a meeting in the Melbourne Temperance Hall in October 1878, backers resolved to build palaces attractive to the working man on a business basis, just as the 1880s Melbourne land boom took off. The Collingwood Coffee Palace opened in 1879 and the Melbourne Coffee Palace in 1882. In 1886 a company led by politician and land boomer James Munro bought the three year old Grand Hotel on Spring Street, renamed it the Grand Coffee Palace, and burned its liquor license, and in 1888 the Federal Coffee Palace became the largest hotel ever built in Australia. The 1893 banking crisis and depression left these bar-less hotels with no margin to survive.

• Sydney joined the boom with the Grand Central Coffee Palace in 1889.
• The Queen's Coffee Palace in Carlton was turned into apartments without ever operating as a hotel.
• The Grand Coffee Palace regained its liquor license by 1897 and still stands as the Hotel Windsor.
• The Mentone Coffee Palace was sold and became a school that operates today as Kilbreda College.
• The Federal Coffee Palace was demolished in 1972 to make way for an office tower.

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Brazil's coffee story is traced to 1727, when Francisco de Melo Palheta, sent to arbitrate a border dispute in French Guiana, left with seeds hidden in a bouquet from the governor's wife. Brazil now grows about a third of the world's coffee, over 2.7 million tons in 2011, mostly in Minas Gerais, São Paulo, and Espírito Santo, where altitude and a distinct wet and dry season suit the plant. The first boom, from the 1830s to the 1850s, supplied factory workers in Europe and the United States, and by the 1840s Brazil held 40 percent of the world market, built on 1.5 million enslaved Africans imported in the first half of the century.

After the foreign slave trade was outlawed in 1850 and slavery abolished in 1888, the colonato system paid immigrant families from Italy, Spain, and Japan a piece rate on thousands of assigned trees while plantation stores kept them in debt. Coffee money built railways and turned São Paulo from about 30,000 people in the 1850s into a metropolis of a million by the 1930s, while São Paulo and Minas Gerais elites ran café com leite politics. The 1906 Taubaté agreement used foreign loans from bankers like the Rothschilds to buy and stockpile surplus beans, encouraging more planting until Brazil supplied 80 percent of the world's coffee in the 1920s, and after the 1929 crash millions of bags were burned.

• The São Paulo Railway hauled cars up the coastal mountains with cables and stationary steam engines.
• The black frost of July 18, 1975, killed over half a billion trees and doubled world coffee prices within a year.
• Brazil's refusal to lower its quotas helped end the International Coffee Agreement in 1989, and the Brazilian Coffee Institute was abolished.
• Nearly all Brazilian coffee is dry processed, with whole cherries sun dried on patios for three to four weeks.
• Coffee fell from nearly 64 percent of exports in 1950 to about 2.5 percent, and Brazil passed the United States in consumption in the mid 2010s.

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Giovanni Giotta was born in 1920 in Rovigno d'Istria, a fishing town that was part of Italy before World War II and now belongs to Croatia. After the region was ceded to Yugoslavia he lived as a displaced person in Monfalcone from 1947 to 1951, then emigrated to San Francisco with his family, arriving with no money, no food, and nowhere to sleep. Priests at Saints Peter and Paul Church found a family to house them and got him a job washing windows, where he sang opera arias over the traffic.

Homesick for the cafés of Trieste, a Habsburg free port since 1719 where James Joyce and Italo Svevo wrote, Giotta took over the Piccola Cafe on Vallejo Street in North Beach in 1956 and renamed it Caffe Trieste. His first customers were Italian neighbors, and the cappuccino became his bridge to Americans raised on instant coffee. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti treated it as a place to sit for hours, and Francis Ford Coppola wrote significant portions of The Godfather screenplay at its tables, earning it the nickname the living room of North Beach.

• Giotta hosted live opera performances at the café on Saturdays.
• In the 1970s his sister Yolanda fed the penniless poet Jack Hirschman for about six months; Hirschman later became San Francisco's poet laureate and celebrated at the café.
• Franchise locations opened in Sausalito, Berkeley, Oakland, and Monterey.
• In 2016 Caffe Trieste was named a San Francisco Legacy Business, the same year Papa Gianni died.
• By 2017 family disputes had erupted, and the Berkeley and Oakland locations cut ties and changed their names.

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On December 29, 1720, Floriano Francesconi opened a two room coffee shop under the Procuratie Nuove in Piazza San Marco and named it Alla Venezia Trionfante, though everyone simply called it Florian. It was one of the only coffeehouses in Venice that let women inside, which drew Giacomo Casanova, and one of the few places to buy Gasparo Gozzi's early newspaper, the Gazzetta Veneta, putting commuters in the same room as playwright Carlo Goldoni and Goethe.

In 1796 the Venetian State Inquisitors, fearful of French revolutionary ideas, forced the founder's grandson Valentino Francesconi to close the café over its Jacobin patrons. After Napoleon's army took Venice in May 1797, a sign celebrating Venice the Triumphant became dangerous, so he renamed it Florian. In 1848 its Senate Hall served as a headquarters for patriots rising against Austria, and the café became a temporary hospital during the fighting. An 1858 redecoration by architect Lodovico Cadorin added themed halls, and Giacomo Casa's Senate Hall ceiling, with allegories of enlightenment and progress, carried hidden Masonic symbols.

• The Chinese Hall and Oriental Hall nodded to Venice's trade with the East, with art by Antonio Pascuti.
• In 1872 the Hall of Illustrious Men added Giulio Carlini's portraits of ten Venetians, including Marco Polo, Titian, and Palladio.
• In 1893 Riccardo Selvatico proposed an international art exhibition while dining in the Senate Hall, and it became the Venice Biennale.
• For its 200th anniversary in 1920, the café added the Art Nouveau Liberty Room with hand painted mirrors.
• Since 1988 its Temporanea program has brought contemporary artists into the halls during the Biennale, and a Florence branch opened on Via del Parione.

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Café de olla, literally pot coffee, is a traditional Mexican drink brewed in an unglazed earthenware pot with water, dark ground coffee, cinnamon, and panela, also called piloncillo, with orange peel, anise, and cloves as common additions. It is drunk mainly in cold climates and rural areas of Mexico, including high country in the Sierra Madre, alongside hearty staples like pozole, menudo, and tamales. The clay has high thermal mass and conducts heat poorly, so the pot absorbs the fire's heat and radiates it back gently, holding a slow simmer instead of scalding the grounds.

Because the pot is unglazed inside, its pores absorb coffee oils and spice aromatics with every batch and release them later, seasoning it like a cast iron skillet, so an old pot brews differently than a new one. Piloncillo is unrefined cane sugar that keeps its molasses, bringing smoky caramel depth where refined white sugar would only add flat sweetness. Everything goes into the pot together from the start and simmers as one, placing café de olla in the family of simmered coffees with Turkish coffee from a cezve rather than espresso or pour over.

• Refined white sugar is about 99.9 percent sucrose; piloncillo is boiled cane juice poured into molds.
• Cinnamaldehyde in cinnamon and eugenol in cloves are vasodilators, which the episode sets against caffeine's vasoconstriction.
• Piloncillo also delivers quick calories for early morning work in the cold.
• Long simmering pulls heavier lipids and oils that a paper filter would trap.
• Orange zest contributes limonene, and anise brings licorice-like anethole.

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Karsk is a Scandinavian drink of equal parts hot coffee and clear spirit: six centiliters of pure alcohol such as Everclear, vodka, or homemade moonshine, matched with six centiliters of coffee that must be heated but never boiled. Purists insist on moonshine because it has no flavor of its own and leaves the coffee in front, a claim the episode questions. The drink was popular in a rural Swedish district in the early 1800s, spread through rural Norway in the second half of the century, and takes its name from an Old Norse word meaning healthy, vigorous, or agile, fitting a hot, caffeinated, alcoholic tonic for farm work through freezing winters.

Today karsk is most firmly rooted in Norway's Trondelag region, among city and country people alike. Cross country skier Petter Northug and musician Bjarne Brondbo are known fans, and former culture minister Trond Giske has said that everyone who grew up in Trondelag has had karsk at some point. Beyond Trondelag the names multiply, and sugar splits drinkers: some regional names refer specifically to the sweetened version, which purists see as masking the burn of the spirit.

• In Hedmark and Oppland, merged into Innlandet in 2020, it is called coffee doctor or by a dialect word for a jack or knave.
• In Sweden it is kask or kaffekask, drunk mostly in the central and northern parts of the country.
• Denmark's kaffepunch swaps the moonshine for schnapps.
• In English speaking countries the vodka version is sometimes called Russian coffee, a name that can also mean coffee with whipped cream.
• Boiling the coffee is avoided because bitter, overextracted coffee clashes with high proof alcohol.

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In 1963 Leslie Buck, an Eastern European immigrant selling blank paper cups for the Sherri Cup Company in New York, noticed how many of the city's diners, coffee shops, and food carts were run by Greek families who had arrived after World War II. To win their orders, he designed a cup just for them: blue and white like the Greek flag, a Greek key border around the rims, an ancient two handled pitcher at the center, three steaming cups, and the slogan We Are Happy To Serve You in angular lettering meant to evoke carved inscriptions, with a sigma standing in for the letter E.

The pitcher was an amphora, but Buck's accent turned the word into Anthora, and the company kept it. By 1994 Sherri was selling 500 million a year, and rivals copied the look with discus throwers, the Parthenon, and slogans like It Is Our Pleasure To Serve You. Buck never received a design royalty but prospered on sales commissions, and when he retired in 1992 the company printed 10,000 custom Anthoras honoring his career. After Sherri was acquired by the Solo Cup Company, sales fell to about 200 million by 2005, and Solo halted regular production in 2006 before nostalgia prompted a limited restart in 2015.

• The cup became instant shorthand for New York in film and television.
• In 2003 Graham Hill of Exception Lab made a ceramic replica with a fake paper seam, sold at the Museum of Modern Art's design shop.
• NBC commissioned a version with its peacock and the Olympic rings for the 2004 Athens Games.
• The cup appeared in a Clark Art Institute exhibition on classical themes in everyday modern life.
• Solo was later absorbed by Dart Container, and Buck died in 2010.