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Edward Lloyd, born around 1648, opened a coffee house on Tower Street in London in 1686, near the docks, as the city rebuilt from the Great Fire of 1666. He aimed it squarely at sailors, merchants, ship captains, and ship owners, and turned it into a clearinghouse for shipping news. Lloyd never wrote an insurance policy or owned a ship. Instead, merchants passed slips describing a ship and cargo around his tables, and investors who accepted part of the risk wrote their names underneath, the physical origin of the word underwriting.

In December 1691 Lloyd moved to Lombard Street, installed a pulpit from which a crier rang a bell and read arrivals, departures, and prices, and hosted candle auctions of ships and cargo. In 1696 and 1697 he published Lloyd's News. The coffee house was also tied to the slave trade: London Gazette ads named it as the drop-off point for captured runaway slaves. After Lloyd died on February 15, 1713, the lease passed in quick succession through his head waiter William Newton, daughter Handy, Samuel Sheppard, and finally Thomas Jemson, who founded Lloyd's List in 1734.

• In a candle auction, bidding ended the instant a pin stuck in a burning candle dropped out.
• Eric Williams documented the link between Lloyd's and the slave trade in Capitalism and Slavery.
• In 1774 the underwriters formed a committee and moved to the Royal Exchange on Cornhill as the Society of Lloyd's.
• A blue plaque marks the Lombard Street site on the wall of a Sainsbury's supermarket.
• Lloyds Bank was founded separately by Sampson Lloyd in Birmingham in 1765 and has no link to the coffee house.

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Peter Schlumbohm was a German chemist who arrived in the United States in the 1930s and died in 1962 at 66 with around 300 patents, from cocktail shakers to a refrigerated garbage can. He called his philosophy beautility, the belief that a perfectly engineered object would be beautiful on its own. In 1941 he founded the Chemex Corporation in Chicopee, Massachusetts, to fix the American morning cup, which percolators ruined by cycling boiling water through the grounds again and again.

The Chemex is an hourglass flask inspired by the Erlenmeyer flask, built for a single pass of water through the grounds. Its thick bonded paper filter traps most coffee oils and the cholesterol-raising compound cafestol, and its instructions call for a grind like kosher salt and water at 93 to 96 degrees Celsius. Schlumbohm then added a turned wooden collar tied with a leather thong, warming a lab instrument for the home. The Illinois Institute of Technology named it one of the best designed products of modern times in 1958, and it entered MoMA's permanent collection.

• The three-layer side of the folded filter must face the spout so the spout stays open as an air vent.
• If the thin side collapses into the spout, trapped air creates a seal that stalls the brew.
• In Ian Fleming's From Russia with Love, James Bond makes his breakfast coffee in a Chemex.
• It appeared in the Paul Newman film Harper and in Mary Richards's apartment on The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
• Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby and its film adaptation also used a Chemex to signal a stylish New York apartment.

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In 2024 Vogue predicted the espresso martini's reign was ending and named the carajillo as the caffeinated cocktail to replace it. The carajillo is simply coffee combined with a spirit, often served in a small glass with a cinnamon stick or lemon peel, and it has no fixed recipe. Its origins are murky but tied to Cuba, where coffee and sugarcane shared the same climate and labor, making rum the natural partner. From there the drink behaves like an agricultural template, taking on whatever spirit grows nearby.

In Colombia and Venezuela it leans on brandy, following Spanish colonial trade in Brandy de Jerez, while Mexico uses smoky mezcal or liqueurs such as Kahlúa, Tia Maria, and Licor 43. Cousins include Irish coffee and the Italian caffè corretto made with grappa. In Costa Rica from roughly the 1950s to the 1970s, men in cafes ordered a snifter of brandy and a separate cup of hot black coffee, then poured the coffee into the snifter themselves so the heat released a cloud of aroma trapped by the glass. The episode also traces how the habit changed language in Catalonia.

• Licor 43 is a Spanish liqueur made with 43 herbs, spices, and citrus elements.
• Mezcal's pit-roasted agave layers smoke onto the roasted notes of the coffee.
• Oak tannins in brandy give the South American version a smoother, velvety mouthfeel.
• Catalan has a phrase for the act, rebentar el cafè, meaning to burst the coffee.
• Standard Spanish has no equivalent single verb for spiking a coffee this way.

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At the World Barista Championship, national champions get 15 minutes to serve 12 drinks to four sensory judges: four espressos, four milk beverages, and four signature beverages, while a technical judge who never tastes a drop watches for flushed group heads, wasted grams, and stray grounds. In a representative year like 2018, 55 national champions entered, the top 15 plus a wild card reached the semifinals, and six made the final. The signature beverage is essentially a non-alcoholic espresso cocktail built to showcase one specific coffee.

The first championship, in Monte Carlo in 2000, went to Robert Thoresen of Norway, and Nordic light-roast pioneers such as Tim Wendelboe, Troels Overdal Poulsen, and Klaus Thomsen ruled the early years. In 2007 the event left Europe and the United States for Tokyo, where James Hoffmann won. In 2016 the rules standardized grinders from sponsor Mahlkönig and replaced the cappuccino with an open milk drink category. Agnieszka Rojewska of Poland became the first woman champion in 2018, and later winners from Colombia and Indonesia marked a shift toward coffee producing nations.

• The competition is run by World Coffee Events, the event arm of the Specialty Coffee Association.
• Standard grinders were framed as removing the advantage of competitors who could ship custom $10,000 gear.
• Juyeon Jeon of South Korea won in 2019, and the 2020 Melbourne event was canceled by the pandemic.
• Diego Campos of Colombia won in 2021 and Mikael Jasin of Indonesia won in 2024 in Busan.
• In 2023 the rules began allowing infused and co-fermented coffees, some fermented with fruit.

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Kona coffee grows only in a narrow belt between 500 and 3,200 feet on the western slopes of Hualalai and Mauna Loa on Hawaii's Big Island, where sunny mornings, afternoon clouds, and porous volcanic soil suit Arabica brought from Brazil by Reverend Samuel Ruggles in 1828. When world coffee prices collapsed in 1899, plantation owners leased 5 to 12 acre parcels to their workers, mostly Japanese laborers from the sugar fields, creating a family microfarm culture that survives in roughly 800 farms averaging under five acres.

Every tree is handpicked several times from August to January because cherries ripen unevenly, and it takes about 15 pounds of cherry to make two pounds of roasted coffee. Beans dry on hoshidana racks with rolling roofs to a moisture level that keeps ochratoxin A mold away, then are graded from Extra Fancy down to Prime, with anything at Number 3 barred from the Kona name. Farmers fought root-knot nematodes, the coffee berry borer found in 2010, and leaf rust in 2021, but their longest battle was against fraud: Hawaiian law lets a Kona blend contain just 10 percent Kona.

• Grafting Arabica onto nematode-resistant Liberica rootstock produced the Fukunaga, named for researcher Edward T. Fukunaga.
• The Hawaii Department of Agriculture imposed a quarantine on green beans leaving the island in November 2010.
• Kona Kai Farms executive Michael Norton relabeled Central American coffee as Kona and pleaded guilty in 2000.
• A 2019 Lanham Act class action against Walmart, Costco, Amazon, Safeway, and Kroger ended in settlements over $13.1 million.
• The official 100% Kona Coffee certification mark, credited to Mayor Stephen Yamashiro, was registered in 2000.

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Eduard Douwes Dekker was a career Dutch colonial administrator in the Dutch East Indies, where the state had taken over from the bankrupt Dutch East India Company and ran the cultivation system, forcing farmers to grow coffee, sugar, and indigo instead of rice, alongside a state opium monopoly marked with a chemical tracer. Posted as assistant resident to Lebak after his predecessor Slotering likely died of poison, Dekker found the local regent seizing villagers' water buffalo and forcing men into unpaid labor. He even lent the regent his own savings, hoping debt was the problem.

His superior, the resident of Bantam, blocked his report, and when Dekker went to the governor general, the aide who locked him in a room was his own brother-in-law. Dekker resigned, sat freezing in Amsterdam, and wrote Max Havelaar under the pen name Multatuli, I have suffered much. Published in May 1860, it used the pompous coffee broker Batavus Droogstoppel as a narrator to mock Dutch complacency, then ended with a direct plea to King William III. The outrage pushed the colony toward the Ethical Policy, whose schools helped train Indonesia's nationalist leaders.

• The book cost four guilders and sold out so quickly a second printing was ordered.
• Publisher J. de Ruyter secretly reset the entire text to print an off-the-books edition and pocket the royalties.
• The counterfeit copies were exposed by a printer's error that ran the words lieve lezer together on page one.
• Dekker did not get to restore his own unedited text until the fourth edition of 1875.
• Pramoedya Ananta Toer called it the book that killed colonialism, yet an Indonesian translation only came in 1972.

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During World War II, the Manhattan Project gave radioactive polonium the code name Postum, after a caffeine-free breakfast drink of roasted wheat bran and molasses. That drink began in 1895 with C.W. Post, a sick man who had absorbed John Harvey Kellogg's anti-caffeine teachings at the Battle Creek sanitarium and saw a market in Victorian anxiety over neurasthenia. Post sold Postum as a cure for a lifestyle problem, and to crush cheap imitators he sold the identical product at a loss under the name Monk's Brew, then pulled it once rivals went bankrupt.

In 1911 his cousin Willis H. Post created a soluble version, and a 1912 ad for Instant Postum is the earliest known use of the word instant for a processed food. The company pushed the slogan There's a Reason and a ghostly cartoon villain named Mr. Coffee Nerves, and wartime coffee rationing sent sales soaring. After the war Postum became a staple for Latter-day Saints and Seventh-day Adventists, until FDA testing found it had more acrylamide by dry weight than any other product tested. Kraft discontinued it in 2007, fans hoarded jars on eBay, and in 2012 two North Carolina teachers bought the recipe.

• Post's company grew into General Foods, which was absorbed into Kraft in 1990.
• Radio sponsorships included Lum and Abner, The Aldrich Family, and the radio Father Knows Best.
• The teachers' firm, Eliza's Quest Foods, had Postum back in Walmart and Kroger by 2018.
• Mr. Burns throws a drink at Homer on The Simpsons shouting, You call this Postum?
• Postum sold during wartime rationing despite admitting it did not taste like coffee, because it preserved the morning ritual.

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The plaque on the Café Procope in Paris calls it the oldest continually operating cafe in the world, but the record says otherwise. Its founder, Sicilian chef Procopio Cutò, started as apprentice to an Armenian named Pascal, who sold lemonade and gritty boiled coffee from a wooden stall on a muddy Paris street until the venture collapsed in 1675 and he fled to London. Procopio diagnosed an image problem, and in 1686 he bought a defunct public bathhouse nicknamed the Cavern and rebuilt it with marble tables, crystal chandeliers, and expensive mirrors modeled on Versailles.

In 1689 the Comédie Française opened across the street, and the cafe became the city's post-theater salon, then an engine of the Enlightenment where Diderot and d'Alembert planned the Encyclopédie. By 1702 Procopio had renamed himself François Procope. Police spies called les mouches took notes on patrons, and during the Revolution Robespierre, Danton, and Marat met there while Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Paul Jones stopped in. The original business closed in 1872, passed through several identities including Au Grand Soleil, and only regained the Procope name and an 18th century look in the late 1980s.

• Procopio dressed his French waiters in Armenian costumes to sell an exotic luxury fantasy to wealthy Parisians.
• In 1752 Rousseau walked out of his own play Narcissus and complained about it at the Procope.
• Voltaire reportedly drank up to 40 cups of coffee a day, mixed with chocolate.
• The red Phrygian cap of liberty is documented as making its first appearance at the cafe.
• The true oldest continuous coffee house is Oxford's Queens Lane Coffee House, open since 1654.

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Near midnight on March 16, 1792, King Gustav III of Sweden was handed an anonymous letter at a masquerade ball in the Royal Opera House in Stockholm, the building he had built himself. It warned that assassins were waiting on the dance floor. He folded it up and walked into the crowd anyway. Born in 1746 during the Age of Liberty, when the Riksdag even appointed his tutors, Gustav was taught by his parents to hide his true feelings, and his marriage in 1766 to Sophia Magdalena of Denmark was poisoned by his mother, Queen Luisa Ulrika, who spread rumors that Count Adolf Munck fathered the heir.

Taking the throne in 1771 amid the feud between the Hats and the Caps, each bribed by France or Russia, Gustav staged a bloodless coup in August 1772 with French money, then used his new power to abolish torture, curb the death penalty, and grant limited religious liberty. In 1788 he started an illegal war on Russia using soldiers dressed in Russian uniforms, survived the Anjala mutiny of his own officers, and turned the peasantry against the nobles to pass the Act of Union and Security in 1789. Enraged nobles, including Jacob Johan Anckarström, Adolf Ribbing, and Claes Fredrik Horn, then planned the shooting at the ball.

• The assassins wore black dominoes and white masks, and the pistol was loaded with two bullets and rusty nails.
• Gustav ordered the opera house doors sealed, governed from his bed for 13 days, and died of sepsis on March 29, 1792.
• His state vodka distillery monopoly was a spectacular failure among Swedes who distilled their own spirits at home.
• He was the first neutral head of state to recognize the United States, while profiting from the slave trade through Saint Barthélemy.
• His death inspired Verdi's opera A Masked Ball, and his autocracy survived him until a new coup in 1809.

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The cezve is the small, lidless Turkish coffee pot with a wide base, narrow neck, pouring lip, and a handle often longer than the pot is tall. It is traditionally hammered from copper or brass, occasionally silver or gold for the wealthy, because copper spreads heat fast and evenly and keeps powder-fine grounds from scorching. The long handle made sense before stovetops, when the pot was buried in embers, coals, or a pan of hot sand that heats it from every side. That fire is written into the name: Turkish cezve comes from an Arabic word meaning ember or burning coal.

Western sellers often call the same pot an ibrik, but in Turkish an ibrik is a large water pitcher or ewer. The word runs back through Arabic and Aramaic to Old Persian roots meaning water and to pour, and foreign traders who saw spouted metal vessels simply applied it to the coffee pot. Across the region the pot changed names, becoming the briki in Greece, the jezva in Serbo-Croatian, and the turka in Russia, while Balkan coppersmiths in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Bulgaria stretched its neck to concentrate the prized foam. Unfiltered and bitter, the coffee closes heavy regional meals and cuts through syrup-soaked sweets.

• A narrower neck speeds rising coffee, builds a denser foam, and traps volatile aromas against cooler room air.
• In Armenia the pot is called a serchep, and Arabic dialects use names including raqwa and kanaka.
• Unfiltered coffee is high in the diterpenes cafestol and kahweol, which paper filters remove and which stimulate bile flow.
• Its tannins strip fats from the palate before desserts such as baklava, lokum, Armenian gata, or Serbian krempita.
• Grounds must settle in the cup before drinking, forcing a social pause that no to-go cup allows.