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Café du Monde has served nearly the same menu from its open air stand on Decatur Street in the French Quarter since 1862: dark roasted coffee with chicory, black or au lait, and beignets, plus milk, hot chocolate, and orange juice. It sits at the upriver end of the French Market in the old Butcher's Hall, on ground where the Spanish built in 1791 and the city rebuilt in 1813 after an 1812 hurricane. The chicory came from Civil War blockades that forced Creoles to stretch coffee, and the square, hollow, sugar buried beignet came with Acadian migrants from Nova Scotia.

At midnight on August 27, 2005, the normally round the clock cafe closed ahead of Hurricane Katrina. The building took only minor damage, and it reopened on October 19, 2005, with more than 100 news outlets presenting it as a sign of the city's recovery. Abroad, the Duskin Company opened Japanese locations in 1990, peaking at 32 before closing the last ones in early 2018. Meanwhile Vietnamese refugees on the Gulf Coast mailed the orange tins to relatives nationwide, making the coffee a staple of Asian grocery stores.

• Chicory root contains inulin, which caramelizes when roasted into a dark, bitter, chocolate like flavor with no caffeine.
• A beignet's wet yeast dough puffs with steam in hot oil, leaving a hollow center.
• Japanese outlets added seasonal desserts and new toppings, straying from the 1862 menu.
• Rival Morning Call, in the French Market since 1870, moved to the suburbs in 1974.
• The cafe appears in James Lee Burke and Anne Rice novels, the film Chef, Treme, and a 1974 Jimmy Buffett song.

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Café Touba is a Senegalese coffee roasted together with djar, the dried fruit of Xylopia aethiopica, also called grains of Selim or Guinea pepper. The usual ratio is about 80 percent coffee to 20 percent spice, sometimes with cloves, and roasting them together fuses the spice oils into the beans before grinding. The drink is named for the holy city of Touba, whose name means felicity or blessedness, and it traces to 1902, when Sheikh Amadou Bamba Mbacké returned from exile in Gabon and introduced it to the Mouride Brotherhood.

For decades it remained a ceremonial drink, central to the Grand Magal of Touba pilgrimage. Then the 2009 financial crisis squeezed Senegalese household budgets, and a World Bank report tracked the rapid elimination of imported coffee from everyday diets. Families switched to the cheaper local brew, and one Dakar restaurant owner said even young children began drinking it at breakfast. The habit outlasted the crisis, crossed into Guinea-Bissau, and cut into instant coffee sales across West Africa.

• French colonial authorities exiled Bamba, a pacifist, because they feared his ability to unify people.
• The spice is grown locally in Touba in central Senegal.
• In Guinea-Bissau, Café Touba went from virtually unknown to the most popular drink in the country within a few years.
• Around 2010, Nestlé responded to falling Nescafé sales by launching Nescafé Ginger and Spice for the region.
• Spray dried instant powder cannot reproduce the co roasting that bonds the spice oils to the beans.

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In 1895 Luigi Lavazza opened a small grocery at Via San Tommaso 10 in Turin, and the company credits him with inventing the coffee blend. By mixing beans from different regions, he could keep flavor steady even when one harvest turned out bitter or thin, and the ratios became a proprietary recipe. Today Luigi Lavazza SpA, run by the third and fourth generations, is bought by roughly 16 million of Italy's 20 million coffee buying households.

The family financed expansion without going public: Carte Noire and Merrild from JDE in 2016, 80 percent of Kicking Horse Coffee in 2017, the Mars UK drinks division for 650 million dollars in 2018, a canned cappuccino with PepsiCo in 2019, and Maxi Coffee in 2022. With about 3,800 employees in more than 90 countries and 2.24 billion euros in 2019 revenue, it ranks as the world's seventh largest roaster. Scale brought friction, including low fair trade certification and a 2019 lawsuit over intellectual property claims against Amazon resellers, and the brand answers with sport, architecture, and art.

• Production sites include Turin, a capsule plant in Gattinara, a decaf plant in Pozzilli, and hubs in France, India, and Brazil.
• Its 2020 sustainability report showed only one in ten Lavazza production companies with fair trade certification.
• Lavazza sponsors Liverpool FC, Juventus, and Williams driver Nicholas Latifi in Formula One.
• The Nuvola headquarters in Turin's Aurora district was designed by architect Cino Zucchi.
• The Lavazza calendar, produced since 1991, has been shot by Helmut Newton, David LaChapelle, Annie Leibovitz, and Platon.

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Alfred Peet was born in 1920 in Alkmaar in the Netherlands, where his father ran a coffee and tea business and young Alfred roasted and ground beans. In 1938 he moved to London to work for Twinings, then spent time in producing regions including New Zealand and Indonesia before settling in San Francisco in 1955. What he found in America was weak, sour robusta coffee, pre ground and left on diner hot plates.

In 1966 he opened Peet's Coffee, Tea and Spices on Vine Street in Berkeley and refused to sell brewed cups, only fresh, dark roasted arabica beans to take home. Regulars called themselves Peetniks. In the early 1970s he coached the three founders of Starbucks, letting them copy his store layout and sharing his supplier lists. He sold the business to Sal Bonavita in 1979 and stayed on as a buyer until 1983. In 1984 Starbucks cofounder Jerry Baldwin bought Peet's, and later sold the Starbucks brand to Howard Schultz to focus on it. Peet died in 2007 at 87.

• Opening in 1966 Berkeley placed the shop at the center of the counterculture near the Free Speech Movement.
• Selling only beans pushed customers to learn grinding, storage, and brewing at home.
• Peet's went public in 2001 and was bought by JAB Holding in 2012 for nearly one billion dollars.
• The episode reports Keurig Dr Pepper acquiring Peet's in August 2025 for 18.4 billion dollars.
• Workers at stores in Davis, Berkeley, Oakland, and Portland began unionizing in the 2020s, and the company spent over 125,000 dollars on consultants to counter the effort.

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In 2004 Alan Adler, a retired Stanford engineering lecturer already famous for the Aerobie flying ring, got fed up with bitter coffee and treated it as an engineering problem. He wanted control over three variables: water temperature, grind size, and contact time. Drip machines run water near boiling, which pulls out bitter compounds, while French presses and pour overs leave too much to chance. His answer, unveiled at the Coffee Fest trade show in Seattle in November 2005, was a plastic chamber, a plunger with an airtight silicone seal, and a screw on cap holding a small paper filter.

Adler's recipe called for a fine grind, water at 176 degrees Fahrenheit for dark roasts, a ten second stir, and a quick press, and the company claimed one fifth the acidity of drip coffee. Users flipped it upside down into the inverted method, bought metal filters he warned against, and forced the company to sell its own accessories. The body changed from polycarbonate to BPA free copolyester in 2009, gray polypropylene in 2014, and clear Tritan in 2023. Adler sold the toy line to Spin Master in 2017, and Tiny Capital bought a controlling stake in 2021.

• The inverted method balances the brewer on its plunger so coffee steeps without dripping through early.
• Lab tests showed the original polycarbonate did not leach BPA, but the company switched plastics anyway to ease public worry.
• The World AeroPress Championship began in Oslo in 2008 with three competitors.
• By 2018 the competition drew more than 3,100 brewers across 61 countries.
• Many champions now use water around 198 degrees, because dense light roasts need more heat than the dark roasts Adler brewed.

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Whenever coffee supplies collapse, people roast whatever they can find. After Napoleon's Continental Blockade of 1806 cut France off from imports, the French turned to roasted chicory root. During the American Civil War, the Union blockade left Southerners brewing rye, okra seeds, and chopped sweet potatoes, and in 1865 the Southern Banner admitted the goal was cheating the palate if we cannot deceive the nerves. In World War II Americans drank Postum, made from roasted wheat bran and molasses.

Economics forced the same tricks in the Eastern bloc. In the late 1970s East Germany introduced Kaffee-Mix, 51 percent coffee cut with roasted rye, sugar beet, and peas, while Ceaușescu's Romania sold a blend nicknamed for its fitness for horses. Religious abstainers in the LDS and Seventh Day Adventist churches use roasted drinks to keep the social ritual, and some substitutes, like chicory in New Orleans, became loved in their own right. The newest wave comes from the lab: Atomo's 2019 molecular coffee from upcycled seeds and husks, and 2021's cell grown coffee from a bioreactor.

• Roasting chicory, chickpeas, or asparagus seeds triggers the Maillard reaction, producing melanoidins and roast aromas without any caffeine.
• Recorded stand ins include dandelion root in the 1830s, roasted chickpeas in 1793 Germany, persimmon seeds, and carbonized molasses.
• Yaupon holly, brewed by Indigenous peoples of the Southeast as the black drink, is a native North American plant that actually contains caffeine.
• Colonists called yaupon cassina and dropped it as a poor man's drink once cheap coffee returned.
• Camp Coffee has been sold in the UK since 1876, and Nestlé's Ricoré chicory drink dates to the 1950s.

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In 1674 a group of English women petitioned against coffee, claiming it left their husbands idle, gossiping, and impotent. That picture of coffee as a waste of time stands against its modern role as workplace fuel, and this episode follows the drink between those poles. It starts with Sufi mystics in Yemen using coffee for night long dhikr, a ban by religious leaders in Mecca, and a fatwa from the Grand Mufti Abu Saud Effendi that reopened the trade. Yemeni exporters boiled beans so they could not be planted, and the Dutch East India Company later manipulated supply by favoring Java over Ceylon.

The monopoly broke through smuggling: Baba Budan carried seven fertile seeds strapped to his body from Mecca to Karnataka around 1670, and Gabriel de Clieu shared his water ration with a seedling bound for Martinique in 1720. From there the episode tours national rituals: Italy's rule against cappuccino after 11 in the morning, Swedish fika, Albania's cafe density, and Hong Kong's yuenyeung. The modern coffee break grew out of Norwegian immigrant women in Stoughton, Wisconsin, and was popularized in 1952 by the Pan American Coffee Bureau.

• By 1675 England had more than 3,000 coffeehouses, and women were barred from entering them.
• Swedish King Gustav III ordered a coffee versus tea test on condemned twins, and both he and the supervising doctors died before the coffee drinking twin.
• Hong Kong cha chaan tengs created yuenyeung in 1936, mixing coffee, tea, and evaporated milk in one cup.
• Behaviorist John B. Watson helped embed the coffee break in American offices while working in advertising for Maxwell House.
• Nearly all arabica descends from a few smuggled plants, leaving the crop genetically narrow and exposed to disease and climate change.

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The coffeehouse began with Sufi monks in 15th century Yemen, who drank coffee to stay awake through all night dhikr chanting. The Arabic word kahwa had originally referred to a type of wine. In 1555 two merchants from Aleppo and Damascus opened a shop in Istanbul's Tahtakale district, and Ottoman coffeehouses soon filled with chess, backgammon, storytellers, and open political debate. Authorities in Mecca had already tried to ban coffeehouses in 1511, and the bans did not hold.

England's first coffeehouse opened in Oxford around 1650, run by a Jewish entrepreneur named Jacob, and Pasqua Rosée opened London's first in 1652. For a penny, anyone could read the news and argue with anyone else, and Edward Lloyd's shop grew into Lloyd's of London while New Jonathan's became the Stock Exchange in 1773. Vienna built a culture of lingering, and Paris's Café Procope, opened in 1689, set the look of mirrors and marble. Women were barred as customers in England and France, and the story runs through Greenwich Village folk clubs and Alfred Peet's Berkeley shop to Luckin Coffee's app driven stores in China.

• King Charles II tried to suppress coffeehouses as places where disaffected persons spread scandal about the Crown, and Londoners ignored him.
• Vienna's coffee culture was formalized in 1685 by Armenian merchant Johannes Diodato, not by beans left behind after the 1683 siege.
• Procopio Cutò furnished the Procope with mirrors and marble tables taken from a bathhouse.
• Mathematician Émilie du Châtelet dressed in men's clothes to get into Café Gradot in Paris.
• Founded in Beijing in 2017, Luckin had passed 20,000 stores in China by 2024, overtaking Starbucks there.

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Biscotti began as survival food. The name comes from the medieval Latin biscoctus, meaning twice cooked, and the second bake pulled out nearly all moisture so the bread would not mold. Roman soldiers, medieval sailors, crusaders, and monks relied on it for long journeys and winters. The English word biscuit shares the root, yet today's biscuits are baked once, and in modern Italian biscotti simply means almost any cookie.

The almond biscuit known today was defined in the mid 1800s by pastry chef Antonio Mattei in Prato, Tuscany, with no butter, oil, milk, or yeast: just flour, sugar, eggs, pine nuts, and raw unskinned almonds. He won a special mention at the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris. A sign on his shop advertising cantuccini, a word locals used for softer imitations, led the public to attach that name to his famous biscuits. In Catalonia, crushed versions of the biscuit thicken savory dishes, and modern coffee shop biscotti with baking powder and chocolate coatings break most of Mattei's rules.

• The dough log is sliced on a diagonal while still warm, because once cooled the fat free slab would shatter.
• In Tuscany the biscuits are an after dinner dessert dunked in Vin Santo, which the dry starch soaks up without collapsing.
• Catalan versions include carquinyolis, while Valencia and Menorca have their own shapes and names.
• In the Baix Llobregat area, crushed biscuits go into sauces for duck stuffed with turnips and for rabbit with snails.
• In Vic, Carcanyoli is also a festival character, and in Vilanova i la Geltrú the biscuits decorate Palm Sunday palms.

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The greasy spoon feels like a 20th century American invention of neon, chrome, and Formica, but the idea of naming a cheap eatery after dirty silverware goes back to at least 1848. In Rome, a tavern called the Gabione, popular with German visitors on the Grand Tour, was so murky that its patrons nicknamed it the dirty spoon. The English phrase greasy spoon first appears in print in 1906 in Macmillan's Magazine, describing a Paris cremerie in Montparnasse where Robert Louis Stevenson used to sit and work. By the 1920s the term had crossed to America, where the grease came to mean the griddle itself.

The business model explains the menu. A single flat top griddle lets one cook sear burgers, scramble eggs, and toast buns at once, cutting equipment, energy, and labor costs, while bulk stews and beans stretch the kitchen further. With no alcohol sales to carry margins, the whole operation depends on volume and fast table turns. Since the 1970s, Greek immigrant families have run many North American diners around the clock, and as fast food chains squeezed independents out, the greasy spoon became a fixture of comics and cartoons.

• Short order means food cooked in minutes right after it is ordered, which shapes the entire kitchen layout.
• Divided blue plates from the Depression era kept gravy off the peas and enforced strict portion control on every special.
• The UK and Irish caff runs on the all day full cooked breakfast, almost all of it done on one hot surface.
• Dagwood eats at Lou's Diner in Blondie, and Bob's Burgers and SpongeBob's Krusty Krab borrow the greasy spoon setting.
• The stained apron and grumpy cook of the media trope reflect long, hot, exhausting shifts at a 400 degree griddle.