pplpod

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Until the late 1800s Britain ran a profitable coffee industry in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, and a fungus wiped it out, pushing the colony and the country toward tea. That fungus, Hemileia vastatrix, is coffee leaf rust, first described by Berkeley and Broome in 1869 from Ceylon samples and nicknamed Devastating Emily by planters. It is an obligate parasite that enters leaf pores within 24 to 48 hours, feeds through haustoria, and releases 300,000 to 400,000 spores from a single lesion. The tree dies of starvation after dropping its leaves, and the disease still costs an estimated 15% of world coffee yields every year.

Scientists long assumed the rust simply cloned itself, since no alternate host was ever found, yet it kept producing new races. The answer turned out to be cryptosexuality: two nuclei inside a single spore fuse and recombine. The rust spread from East Africa to India in 1870, Java in 1878, Brazil in 1970, and Maui in late 2020. The 2012 to 2014 Latin American epidemic caused about $1 billion in damage, and in Honduras 10,000 family farms lost their entire production. Farmers now combine pruning and spacing, copper sprays, and resistant F1 hybrids such as Starmaya, bred by CIRAD and grown from seed.

• Dry spores resist UV light and can ride high altitude winds for up to six weeks.
• The fungus needs free water on the leaf and prefers 16 to 28 degrees Celsius, which is why high farms were safer.
• Before the 2012 outbreak, 82% of farms in the affected region were certified organic and planted with susceptible Caturra, Bourbon, and Typica.
• Fungicides can reach half of a farmer's production costs.
• Resistant plants kill their own cells around an infection, starving the rust through hypersensitive cell death.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Coffee as a drink first shows up credibly in 15th century Yemen, around the port of Mocha, where Sufi monks used it to stay awake through night devotions. Pilgrims carried it to Mecca and along trade routes to Medina, Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, and Constantinople. The coffee houses that followed became secular gathering places for news and political talk, and the authorities pushed back: orthodox imams in Mecca banned coffee in 1511, a Cairo ban followed in 1532, and mobs sacked coffee houses and warehouses. Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent intervened, and his Grand Mufti issued a fatwa declaring coffee permissible, after which the houses became known as schools of the wise.

The episode traces the word coffee from Dutch through Ottoman Turkish kahve to Arabic qahwa, a word once tied to dark wine and a root meaning to lack hunger, while the plant itself is called bunn. It then walks through the brew: unfiltered, boiled in a dallah, heavy with cardamom and often saffron and cloves, and pounded in a mihbaj whose rhythm tells neighbors guests are welcome. Gulf coffee is lightly roasted and golden, Levantine coffee is dark, and Bedouin qahwa murra is bitter and boiled for hours. Serving follows strict rules, and the bitter brew anchors funerals shared by Arab Muslims and Christians.

• UNESCO lists Arabic coffee as intangible cultural heritage.
• The server holds the dallah in the right hand and the handleless finjan in the left, and guests receive and return the cup with the right hand.
• Three cups is polite: one for the soul, one for the sword, and one for the guest, with a side to side wiggle to signal you are done.
• Unsweetened coffee is paired with dates and sweets to balance its bitterness.
• Leftover grounds are read as fortunes by flipping the finjan onto its saucer.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Union soldiers in the American Civil War were issued Essence of Coffee, a gritty paste they compared to axle grease. This episode follows how that sludge became a $34 billion industry. David Strang of New Zealand patented a dry hot air process, Satoru Kato showed a powdered coffee at the 1901 Pan American Exposition, and George Constant Lewis Washington put a product on shelves in 1910, but his powder was so hygroscopic it clumped back into paste. In 1938 Nestlé chemist Max Morgenthaler solved it by making the original Nescafé half coffee solids and half maltodextrins, and in the 1950s General Foods reached 100% coffee by extracting the bean's own polysaccharides at up to 175 degrees Celsius under pressure.

Inside the plants, spray drying towers fling extract off titanium wheels spinning around 20,000 RPM, drying droplets in 5 to 30 seconds, while freeze drying, launched by Maxwell House in 1963, uses vacuum sublimation that puffs granules to ten times their volume. Captured roasting gases are sprayed back on as aroma, and spent grounds are burned as plant fuel. A cup carries about 66 mg of caffeine against 112 mg for drip, and it cuts iron absorption sharply when drunk with a meal. The UK took to it through GI rations in World War II, and a 1995 Rochester Institute of Technology class turned it into a film developer called Caffeinol.

• Roughly half of the world's green coffee goes into instant coffee production.
• Steam agglomeration, used since about 1968, clumps fine spray dried dust into familiar granules.
• Iron absorption fell from 5.80% with water to 0.97% with instant coffee, and to 0.53% at double strength; drinking it an hour before the meal removed the effect.
• Instant coffee is 77% of UK coffee sales, compared with 1% in Italy and 7% in the United States.
• Life cycle studies find a lower footprint per cup than drip or pod coffee, thanks to light shipping and no wet grounds at home.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

About 60 percent of the world's coffee comes from Coffea arabica, yet in the wild it is classified as endangered, surviving in shrinking mountain forests of South Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Yemen. Arabica arose between roughly 543,000 and over a million years ago when Coffea canephora, known as Robusta, crossed with Coffea eugenioides in East Africa. Instead of a sterile offspring, the new plant became an allotetraploid, keeping both parents' full genomes for 44 chromosomes. It demands altitudes around 1,200 to 1,500 meters, temperatures of 15 to 24 degrees Celsius, steady rain, and shade.

Nearly all cultivated Arabica descends from a handful of plants taken out of Yemen through the port of Mocha, so plantations hold less than 1 percent of the genetic diversity of the wild Ethiopian forests. Those forests once covered about 31 percent of Ethiopia and now cover about 4 percent. Warming lets the coffee berry borer climb to higher farms, and leaf rust cut Central American output by 16 percent in 2012 and 2013 and costs up to $2 billion a year. Models suggest over half of today's coffee land could be unsuitable for Arabica by 2050, and since 2023 some big roasters have quietly dropped 100% Arabica from their bags.

• A string of sunny days can make a tree overflower and drain its own roots and leaves to feed the fruit.
• Outside its native range, Arabica spreads as an invasive weed in Hawaii, Sri Lanka, and Queensland.
• Wild populations in Ethiopia could fall by up to 80 percent by 2088 from climate stress.
• Coffea stenophylla from West Africa tastes close to good Arabica but tolerates far more heat.
• Natural mutants labeled AC1, AC2, and AC3 contain about 0.76 milligrams of caffeine per gram versus about 12 for normal Arabica.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In 1752 Egbert Douwes opened a grocery called De Witte Os, the White Ox, in the Dutch town of Joure. In 1780 he handed it to his eldest son, Douwe Egberts, whose name the company still carries, and who narrowed the shop to coffee, tea, and tobacco. In 1925 the firm introduced a red seal with the initials DE as a guarantee of quality, and it named a tobacco brand White Ox after the original store. From 1948 it expanded into Belgium, France, Spain, and Denmark, and in 1968 it created the holding company Royal Douwe Egberts to fund acquisitions.

In 1978 the American Consolidated Foods Corporation, later Sara Lee, bought the company and funded its 1989 takeover of Dutch rival Van Nelle. It sold its tobacco brands to Imperial Tobacco in 1998 and launched the Senseo pod machine with Philips in 2001. In 2007 it sued the province of Groningen over rules requiring EKO organic and Max Havelaar Fairtrade coffee in government purchasing, and lost. Sara Lee spun it off in 2012 as D.E Master Blenders 1753, JAB Holding took it private in 2013 for $9.8 billion, and a 2020 merger with Peet's created JDE Peet's.

• Douwe Egberts set up its own coffee and tea sustainability foundation in 2002.
• The Groningen ruling set a precedent letting European governments require Fairtrade products in procurement.
• JAB bought Norway's Kaffehuset Friele soon after taking the company private.
• EU competition chief Margrethe Vestager approved the 2015 Mondelez coffee merger only after Carte Noire and Merrild went to Lavazza.
• JDE Peet's brands include Jacobs, Pickwick, Senseo, and Tassimo, with roughly 7 billion euros in annual turnover.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Ludwig Roselius, born in Bremen in 1874, founded Café HAG in 1906 on a process that steamed green coffee beans in brine, opened their pores, and washed out the caffeine with benzene. He poured the fortune into avant-garde art, backing Paula Modersohn-Becker and sculptor Bernhard Hoetger, and from 1902 turned Böttcherstraße in Bremen into a brick expressionist work of art, adding his Glockenspiel house in 1928. His Coffee HAG albums of town coats of arms worked like a loyalty program built on regional pride.

Roselius became chairman of Bremen aircraft maker Focke-Wulf in 1925, and by 1938 his coffee group held 46 percent while ITT, through Lorenz AG, held 28 percent. He was a patron member of the SS and met Hitler as early as 1922, yet the party rejected his membership twice over his expressionist art and his theory of a Lower German race. After a 1934 bone cancer diagnosis cost him his left leg, he hired philosopher Barbara Goette, who he said saved his life after Hitler denounced him at the September 1936 Nuremberg rally, and who pushed him toward joining the German resistance in 1942.

• Barbara Goette had passed her state exams with distinction in mathematics, physics, and philosophy at Kiel.
• She urged Roselius to address the conditions of forced laborers and prisoners of war at Focke-Wulf plants.
• He had a Focke-Wulf Fw 200 fitted with 26 seats because her birthday fell on the 26th.
• She cared for him at the Hotel Kaiserhof in Berlin until his death in May 1943.
• After the war Coffee HAG funded the rebuilding of bombed Böttcherstraße, now home to the Ludwig Roselius Museum.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Murad IV was born in Constantinople in 1612 to Sultan Ahmed I and Kösem Sultan, and grew up in the kafes, or cage, the windowless palace apartments where princes lived under guard, never knowing whether the next visitor was a servant or an executioner. He became sultan at 11 in 1623, with his mother as regent, as the Safavids seized Ottoman Iraq, revolts spread in Anatolia, and the 1625 Bayram Pasha plague killed about a thousand people a day in the capital. In 1631 rebellious Janissaries stormed the palace and killed the Grand Vizier before his eyes.

By 1632 Murad took full control, outlawing coffee houses, tobacco, and opium to dismantle the places where rebellion was organized. He legalized alcohol in 1632, then banned it under penalty of death in 1634, and he even executed the Sheikh al-Islam, a religious leader traditionally exempt from capital punishment. Leading his army in person, he took Tabriz and Hamadan and captured Baghdad in 1638 after a 40-day siege, leading to the 1639 Treaty of Zuhab, whose border still roughly divides Turkey, Iran, and Iraq. He died of cirrhosis in 1640, at 27.

• The Cibali fire of September 1633 started from a spark near a ship being caulked and burned a fifth of the city for 30 hours.
• He had a Grand Vizier strangled for beating his own mother-in-law.
• He wrote poetry as Muradi and promoted the palace poet Cihadi Bey for solving his riddle.
• Mughal envoys from Shah Jahan met him during the Baghdad campaign, and he had them escorted to Basra.
• All of his at least 15 sons died in infancy, and a rumored deathbed order to kill his brother Ibrahim was never carried out.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Turkish coffee leaves the grounds in the cup. Arabica beans are roasted in a shallow iron pan, cooled in a walnut box that wicks away surface oil, and ground to a powder of 75 to 125 microns. Water, coffee, and sugar go into a tapered copper cezve and are pulled from the heat the moment a foam crust rises, sometimes flavored with cardamom, mastic, or ambergris. The drink began with Sufi mystics in Yemen who boiled roasted beans for night vigils, and the first Istanbul coffee houses opened around 1554, founded by Hakam of Aleppo and Shams of Damascus.

Within 15 years there were over 600 coffee houses in Istanbul, and rulers feared them as hubs of dissent: coffee shipments were sunk in 1543, and under Murad IV repeat offenders were sewn into sacks and thrown into the Bosphorus, while sultans kept a chief coffee maker in the palace. Europeans at first found the brew too bitter and costly, so they diluted it, and Pasqua Rosée's 1652 London ad promised cures for gout and scurvy. The Dutch and French later broke the Yemeni monopoly, and by the French Revolution 80 percent of the world's coffee came from the Americas.

• Fortune tellers read the patterns of grounds in an upturned cup, a practice called tasseography.
• A prospective bride may secretly salt the groom's coffee to test whether he drinks it without complaint.
• Shortages around World War II led Turks to roast and grind chickpeas as a stand-in.
• After the 1974 invasion of Cyprus, Greek cafes renamed the same drink Greek coffee.
• Bosnian coffee uses a second boil to build an extra thick foam called kaimak.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

The Café de Flore opened in the 1880s at the corner of Boulevard Saint-Germain and Rue Saint-Benoît in Paris, during the Third Republic, though its exact opening date is lost. Its poetic name came from a sculpture of Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers, standing across the boulevard. Early regulars included Joris-Karl Huysmans and Remy de Gourmont, and Charles Maurras wrote Au signe de Flore on its first floor, while the Revue d'Action Française was founded there in 1899.

Between the wars the cafe drew Pablo Picasso, Georges Bataille, Robert Desnos, Léon-Paul Fargue, and Raymond Queneau, along with Zhou Enlai, the future premier of the People's Republic of China, then living in France. After World War II it rivaled Les Deux Magots next door, and Adam Gopnik argued in A Tale of Two Cafés that the Flore eventually won the prestige contest. Romanian thinkers Emil Cioran, Benjamin Fondane, and Eugène Ionesco gathered there, and James Baldwin wrote much of Go Tell It on the Mountain upstairs, fueled by coffee and cognac.

• The Art Deco interior, with red seats, mahogany, and mirrors, has barely changed since World War II.
• In autumn 1960 Yves Saint Laurent named a gray flannel Dior ensemble Café de Flore.
• Frédéric Beigbeder launched the Prix de Flore literary prize there in 1994.
• Amanda Lear filmed a music video at the cafe in 1981.
• It appears in Absolutely Fabulous and in season one, episode six of Emily in Paris.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In 1991, computer scientists Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky at the University of Cambridge computer laboratory were tired of walking to the Trojan Room only to find the coffee pot empty. They aimed a 128 by 128 pixel grayscale camera at it, wired it to a video capture card in an Acorn Archimedes, and split the software: Jardetzky wrote the server that grabbed frames, and Stafford-Fraser wrote XCoffee, a client for the X Window System that showed a tiny image refreshing every few seconds on researchers' screens across the lab's local network.

In 1993 the Mosaic browser brought inline images to the web, and in November of that year Daniel Gordon and Martin Johnson connected the feed over HTTP so anyone could reload a page and see the pot. It became the world's first webcam and drew visitors worldwide for nearly a decade. When the lab moved to the William Gates Building, the feed was cut on August 22, 2001, at 09:54 UTC, with a final frame showing a hand reaching in to switch it off. The last Krups machine then sold on eBay to Der Spiegel for £3,350.

• Over its life the camera watched four or five different coffee machines.
• The shutdown made front-page news in The Times of London and The Washington Post.
• Krups refurbished the auctioned pot for free, and it brewed coffee in Der Spiegel's newsroom.
• Since 2016 it has been on loan to the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum in Paderborn, Germany.
• The 1998 April Fools spoof RFC 2324 defined the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol and error 418, I'm a teapot.