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Nearly all the world's coffee comes from two species: Coffea arabica, prized for flavor but dependent on cool highlands, and Coffea canephora, or Robusta, hardier but harsher. Coffea stenophylla, the narrow leaved coffee also known as highland or Sierra Leone coffee, grows as a shrub or small tree of 3 to 6 meters across Guinea, Ivory Coast, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, with glossy tapered leaves and berries that ripen dark purple to nearly black. Swedish botanist Adam Afzelius found it in the 18th century, and Scottish botanist George Don formally described it in 1834.

In 1894 Sir William H. Quayle Jones, deputy governor of Sierra Leone, sent seeds to Kew, and plants reached Trinidad, where superintendent J. H. Hart reported in 1898 that the coffee was excellent and equal to the finest arabica. Its small berries and low yields made it unprofitable for a bulk commodity trade, and it dropped out of cultivation. With leaf rust spreading and highland farms warming, Kew's head of coffee research Aaron Davis and colleagues went looking for it, found wild plants in Ivory Coast and Sierra Leone in 2019 and 2020, and saw it perform well at around 150 meters of elevation.

• Blind tastings describe it as naturally sweet with medium high acidity, fruitiness, and good mouthfeel.
• Arabica usually needs 800 meters or more; in low, hot places its fruit ripens too fast and tastes flat.
• By 2018 researchers found stenophylla was not commercially grown anywhere on Earth.
• It is listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List, threatened by deforestation in the Upper Guinean forests.
• It could be grown as a crop in its own right or crossed with commercial coffee to add heat tolerance.

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For much of the 20th century the perk and gurgle of a percolator was the sound of the American morning. Inside, water in the bottom chamber boils and steam bubbles channeled up a central tube act like a gas lift pump, throwing hot water against the lid and down through a perforated basket of coarse grounds. The brewed liquid falls back into the reservoir and is pumped through again and again, so the pot keeps extracting past the acids and sugars into bitter tannins unless it comes off the heat when the slow perking turns into a steady gurgle.

Parisian tinsmith Joseph Henri Marie Laurens built a version with a rising tube in 1819, and James Nason of Massachusetts received the first US percolator patent in 1865 for a different mechanism. The modern design came from Illinois farmer Hanson Goodrich in 1889: a boiling base, a central tube, and a hanging basket that could turn an ordinary pot into a percolator. General Electric was publishing Coffee Making by Electricity by 1905, and automatic models of the 1940s lowered the heat on their own. Then, in the early 1970s, home electric drip machines and improved freeze dried instant coffee ended its reign within a few years.

• In 1970 donut shaped paper filter rings held premeasured coffee and slid over the tube; General Foods' Max Pax was discontinued by 1976.
• Germany's Neue Aromatur used double layered, cross slit porcelain filters instead of paper.
• Siphon brewers from the early 1830s pull coffee down through a cooling vacuum once, so they are not percolators.
• Melitta Bentz's 1908 drip method is a single gravity pass through the grounds.
• Alfonso Bialetti's 1933 moka pot uses sealed vapor pressure and never recycles coffee, yet North Americans often call it a percolator.

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On café menus in Sydney and Auckland, the long black sits beside the short black and the Americano, and the episode argues that choosing between them changes the physics in the cup. A long black is about 100 to 120 milliliters, roughly four ounces, of hot water with a double shot of espresso extracted directly on top. A traditional Americano reverses the order and the strength: a single shot goes in first and hot water is poured over it, often stretched to fill an 8, 12, or 16 ounce mug, so the long black is far more concentrated.

The order matters because of crema, the golden foam of coffee oils and carbon dioxide emulsified under about nine bars of pressure. Crema is lighter than water, so espresso pulled onto a pillow of water keeps it floating intact, while water poured onto espresso blasts it apart. The drink took shape in Australia and New Zealand in the 1950s and 1960s, when Italian immigrants brought commercial espresso machines to tea and instant coffee cultures and locals wanted a strong drink to sip slowly. Rather than run a lungo, which pushes extra water through the grounds into bitter territory, cafés added clean water that never touched the spent puck.

• The episode compares pouring water onto espresso to dumping tap water onto the foam head of a stout.
• An unbroken crema caps the cup with aromatics, so every sip begins with smell.
• The first sip passes through the crema for a velvety texture before the hot coffee beneath.
• Extraction runs in stages: acids and salts, then sugars, then tannins and astringent compounds.
• Because a single shot is locally called a short black, its stretched version became the long black.

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Lungo is Italian for long, and a caffè lungo is an espresso pulled with roughly twice the usual water through the same dose of ground coffee. A standard shot, the normale, takes about 18 to 30 seconds and yields 25 to 30 milliliters, while a lungo can run for up to a full minute and fill the cup with 50 to 70 milliliters. The episode lays out the brewing ratios behind the menu: a ristretto near 1:1, a normale near 1:2, and a lungo stretched to 1:4, with the bean blend, often Arabica and Robusta in traditional Italian espresso, the fineness of the grind, and the machine's pressure setting the pace.

The key is that coffee's flavor compounds dissolve at different rates. Pressurized water first strips fruit acids, organic acids, and simple sugars, then, past the 20 to 30 second mark, begins breaking down heavier plant fibers, lipids, and tannins, which gives a lungo a bitterness, smokiness, and depth a normale never reaches. That is why an Americano, espresso topped with hot water, or a long black, espresso pulled into hot water to protect the crema, can never taste like a lungo: their extra water never passes through the coffee grounds under pressure.

• A lungo is not a half strength espresso; it holds a different mix of compounds.
• The episode frames extraction as an orchestra, with acids and sugars as early violins and tannins as late arriving tubas.
• Crema is a layer of emulsified oils and carbon dioxide foam that pouring water over espresso tends to break apart.
• In French speaking Quebec the lungo is the café allongé, a staple of the province's cafés.
• Tannins and heavy lipids only give way after prolonged battering by high pressure, near boiling water.

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Angelo Moriondo was born in Turin on June 6, 1851, into a family of luxury makers: his grandfather founded a liqueur company, and his father Giacomo, with Angelo's uncle Agostino and a cousin, founded the chocolate firm Moriondo and Gariglio. Angelo bought the Grand Hotel Ligure in Piazza Carlo Felice and the American Bar in the Galleria Nazionale on Via Roma, and ran into the same daily bottleneck as every venue of the era: steeped coffee took around ten minutes, far too slow for a crowded lobby. With a mechanic named Martina building under his supervision, he developed a bulk brewer that used separate supplies of pressurized boiling water and steam to push water through a bed of coffee.

The machine debuted at the 1884 General Expo of Turin and won a bronze medal, and on May 16, 1884, Moriondo was granted a six year patent for the economic and instantaneous preparation of coffee. He updated it that November, registered it in Paris in October 1885, and patented each later improvement, yet he never built a factory or licensed the design. Instead he kept a handful of hand built machines inside his own hotel and bar as an exclusive draw. When he died in Marentino on May 31, 1914, the innovation had stayed in his own establishments, and later inventors such as Luigi Bezzera and Desiderio Pavoni put their names on machines sold worldwide.

• Coffee historian Ian Bersten credits it as the first machine to control steam and water separately as they passed through the coffee.
• It was a high capacity batch brewer for a busy hotel, not a single cup espresso maker.
• Filing foreign patents in the 1880s meant hiring lawyers, drafting schematics, and navigating foreign bureaucracy.
• Moriondo treated exclusivity itself as advertising: to taste the coffee, customers had to walk through his doors.
• Google marked his 171st birthday with a worldwide Doodle on June 6, 2022.

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On July 14, 1683, Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha laid siege to Vienna, the city the Ottomans had failed to take in 1529 and prized as the key to the Danube trade routes. The campaign grew out of Emperor Leopold I's crackdown on Protestants in Hungary, which sparked a revolt led by Imre Thokoly, whom the Ottomans backed and promised a crown. The Ottoman army, 90,000 to over 170,000 people driving herds of sheep and cattle, mobilized in early 1682 but had to wait 15 months for spring. Leopold fled to Passau and sealed the Treaty of Warsaw with Poland's King John III Sobieski, while Count Ernst Rudiger von Starhemberg held the rotting walls with about 15,000 soldiers and 8,700 civilian volunteers, refusing to surrender after the massacre at Perchtoldsdorf.

Rather than storm the city, Kara Mustafa dug mines under the walls, likely hoping a formal surrender would hand him Vienna's wealth intact instead of losing it to plunder. Inside, sleeping sentries could be shot and residents ate cats and donkeys. A relief army of 70,000 to 80,000 nearly came apart over who would pay for troops and supplies until Pope Innocent XI sent funds. On September 12 the fighting began at 4 a.m., the defenders disarmed the final ten mines, and around 6 p.m. Sobieski led 18,000 horsemen, spearheaded by 3,000 winged hussars, down the Kahlenberg into a worn out Ottoman line that broke in under three hours.

• Defenders located Ottoman sappers by watching for ripples on drums of water set on their tunnel floors.
• Wallachian forces abandoned a key Danube bridge, easing the relief army's crossing.
• Jerzy Franciszek Kulczycki crossed the siege lines in Ottoman dress, singing Turkish songs, to coordinate the attack.
• Sobieski wrote to the Pope, we came, we saw, God conquered, and described camels and ostriches left in the abandoned camp.
• Kara Mustafa Pasha was strangled with a silk cord in Belgrade on Christmas Day 1683, and the 1699 Treaty of Karlowitz followed.

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In the southern Ethiopian highlands, the Kingdom of Kaffa sat inside a natural fortress: the Gojeb River to the north, the Omo River wrapping the east and south, and steep ravines and dense forest in between. The soil gave three harvests a year, and the Kafecho people spoke an Omotic language unrelated to the Semitic tongues of the northern empire. Around 1390 a ruler named Minjo ousted the Mato dynasty, whose 32 kings survive in oral tradition without a single remembered name, and founded the kingdom with its capital at Banga. Kaffa kept order through a rigid caste system: blacksmiths, leather workers, and Manjo hunters held a submerged status, yet the Manjo had their own sub-king and were trusted to guard the royal compounds and the kingdom's gates.

Kaffa grew rich exporting gold, civet oil for the perfume trade, and slaves, while its coffee exports were modest, perhaps 50,000 to 60,000 kilograms a year in the 1880s. In the 16th century Emperor Sarsa Dengel pressed Kaffa to adopt Christianity and built a church to St. George at Baha, but once northern pressure faded it became a local men's ritual house that kept George's name. Expansion peaked under King Hoti Gaocho, who ruled from 1798 to 1821 and whose army, in legend, stopped beneath a tree at Woliso. Kaffa repelled invasions in 1890 and 1893, but on September 11, 1897, the last king, Gaki Sherocho, was captured by the forces of Emperor Menelik II, who carried European repeating rifles against Kaffa's spears.

• Kaffa's internal currency, the amole, was a block of salt, exchanged at four or five blocks to one Maria Theresa thaler.
• Honey was harvested from wooden barrels hung high in forest trees for wild bees.
• Islam, brought by Ethiopian Muslim traders, was absorbed locally as simply the religion of the traders.
• An 18th century Mecha Oromo invasion took Kaffa's territory north of the Gojeb River.
• After annexation, slave raids led by Abba Jifar II of Jimma nearly emptied the region of its people.

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In 1913 Sigmund Freud, Leon Trotsky, Joseph Stalin, and Adolf Hitler all lived in Vienna, and all were regulars at the same institution, the Viennese coffee house. UNESCO describes it as a place where time and space are consumed but only the coffee appears on the bill. The episode breaks down how the room was built for lingering: historicist interiors, marble tabletops, bentwood Thonet No. 14 chairs you can sit in for hours, pastries like apple strudel, Punschkrapfen, and Linzer torte, and the Einspänner served in glass under cold whipped cream. Above all, a glass of water arrives with every coffee and is refilled unasked, signaling that nobody will rush you.

Vienna credits its first coffee house to Jerzy Franciszek Kulczycki, who supposedly got sacks of beans left by the retreating Ottoman army after the 1683 siege, beans soldiers took for camel feed. Historians say an Armenian, Johannes Diodato, opened the first one in 1685, with Greek merchants expanding the trade. Stefan Zweig called the coffee house a democratic club where one cheap cup bought a day of international newspapers. Nazism and the Holocaust destroyed its clientele, and television and fast Italian espresso bars brought the 1950s coffee house death, while Trieste kept the tradition alive.

• Early cafes showed customers a color chart and mixed milk and coffee to the shade they pointed at.
• Poet Peter Altenberg used Café Central as his mailing address.
• Karl Kraus wrote much of his journal Die Fackel at cafe tables.
• Freud favored Café Landtmann, and Trotsky preferred Café Griensteidl.
• Today Café Sperl and Café Schwarzenberg thrive again, and Vollpension employs senior citizens as bakers and hosts.

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Illy Ferenc was born in Temesvár in the Austro Hungarian Empire, a city now called Timișoara in Romania. Conscripted into the Austro Hungarian army in World War I, he was left without a homeland when the empire dissolved and the Treaty of Trianon redrew the map, so he stayed with his sister in Trieste, newly under Italian rule. As Francesco Illy he founded a business there in 1933 trading cocoa and coffee, then dropped cocoa. In 1935 he built the Illetta, a machine that used compressed air rather than steam to push water just below boiling through the grounds, and it is considered the predecessor of modern automatic espresso machines.

He also packed roasted coffee in cans with the air replaced by pressurized nitrogen, so it could travel beyond Trieste without going stale. His son Ernesto Illy, a chemist who lived from 1925 to 2008, built a research lab, partnered with universities, and treated coffee's more than a thousand compounds as a science. The third generation, led by chairman Andrea Illy with Anna, Francesco, and Riccardo, bought 100% Arabica directly from Brazil, Colombia, India, Africa, and Central America, and taught growers for free.

• Steam scorches the grounds and draws out bitter tannins, while pressurized water near 90 degrees Celsius emulsifies oils into crema.
• The Ernesto Illy Trieste Science Prize, run from 2004 to 2012 with the World Academy of Sciences, honored scientists from the developing world.
• The University of Coffee, founded in 1999 in Naples, now has 27 branches, and its Brazil course runs 360 hours.
• Illy buys 10 to 30% of trained growers' crops at a premium with no exclusive contract.
• The Illy Art Collection, begun in 1992, featured cups by Rauschenberg, Koons, Yoko Ono, David Byrne, and Francis Ford Coppola.

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Astronauts long drank instant coffee from pouches, until Italian aerospace firm Argotec and Lavazza teamed up in 2014 to ask whether real espresso could be brewed without gravity. The Italian Space Agency sponsored the ISSpresso as a payload, which opened the path to NASA approval. In an 18 month program the team built four versions: a 2D model to prove the plumbing, an elegance model for the mechanics, a ground model identical to the flight unit for launch vibration, thermal, and electromagnetic testing, and the protoflight model that actually flew. The finished machine measured 43 by 42 by 36 centimeters and weighed nearly 20 kilograms.

Because a burst line would release floating balls of scalding water near life support electronics, plastic tubing gave way to steel ducts rated to 400 bar, about 5,800 PSI, when espresso needs 9 to 15. Microswitches stop the flow unless the capsule door is sealed, an aluminum piston ejects used capsules into a pouch, and a zero G cup uses capillary action along a sharp inner corner to bring coffee to the lips. The ISSpresso reached the station on SpaceX CRS-6 on April 14, 2015, and doubled as a fluid dynamics experiment on foam and multiphase flow.

• Its water container used the same connections as the station's existing potable water dispenser.
• Settings included a 30 ml short, a 60 ml long, a 120 ml option for tea or broth, and a 60 ml flush.
• Samantha Cristoforetti drank the first espresso brewed in microgravity on May 3, 2015.
• Paolo Nespoli used it for International Coffee Day on September 30, 2017.
• Its mission ended December 14, 2017, and it returned to Earth on SpaceX CRS-13.