America is coffee-obsessed. From Central Perk’s red couch being the centre of major plot twists in Friends to the fact the average American drank more than two cups a day. And the conventional explanation is pretty straightforward: an English colonist introduces coffee to Jamestown in 1607. 150 years later Americans rebel against the British by throwing tea chests into Boston harbour and drinking coffee becomes their patriotic duty. Oh, and of course who won the civil war? The side that had the coffee. But, actually, the truth is much more surprising, and reveals a much more counter-intuitiv ..read more

One morning back in the ‘80s, Howard Schultz walks out of his Milan hotel, stumbles into an espresso bar, and fundamentally changes coffee history. He discovered (and then popularises) the iconic, timeless Italian coffee experience: Rich thick coffee, an affordable price and great theatre. But this Italian ritual is surprisingly young, so young that Howard Schultz was in school while some of it was being developed! In this third episode of Series Two of A History of Coffee, we show you why for most of Italy’s history, coffee was thin, expensive, dull to watch…and that’s if you were lucky en ..read more

Haiti was once the biggest, most profitable coffee growing region in the world. But today Haiti is one of the world’s poorest nations where you can’t get a bag of Haitian beans delivered to Berlin in a week for love nor money. In this second episode of Series Two of A History of Coffee, we show you how colonialism and racism dragged Haiti into poverty, and the role of coffee at the centre of it. Be warned: this episode contains graphic descriptions of violence. A History of Coffee is a collaboration between documentary maker James Harper of the Filter Stories coffee podcast and Jonathan Mo ..read more

A coffee shop is a lot more than just a place to drink coffee. The seats and sofas encourage you to invite a friend, and chat. And chatting is powerful: ideas that emerge from these caffeine-fuelled conversations give birth to modern finance and even the founding of great artistic and scientific institutions. Meanwhile, other ideas threaten those in power, and have led to many attempts to ban coffeeshops (and even coffee itself!) these last 500 years. In the first episode of Series Two of A History of Coffee, we show you how the coffee shop changed the world, and we ask whether it still has ..read more

We're back with more stories about the tiny psychoactive seed that changed the world and continues to shape our lives today. In Series Two, we reveal how the invention of the coffee shop revolutionised societies, why colonialism, racism and coffee have kept once prosperous Haiti poor today, how Italy's revered espresso culture was created, and we debunk many myths around America's supposed love affair with coffee. If we want to make coffee a more equitable industry that’s also kinder to the environment, a place to start is understanding the stories and systems that put the coffee into your c ..read more

We have an exciting announcement....AND, a story about Sri Lanka and coffee history we think you're really going to like. Sri Lankan coffee has delicious notes of chocolate and caramel. But it’s basically impossible to find, and we’re going to bet you’ve never drank it. But that's really odd, because Sri Lanka has the perfect climate to grow coffee, and was once one of the biggest coffee growing countries in the world. But Sri Lanka was the victim of an ecological ticking time bomb. And this bomb is still ticking, and is going to explode again. In this episode of Adventures in Coffee, prod ..read more

Coffee has a fascinating history stretching back hundreds of years. But tea takes it to the next level, stretching back thousands. And it too was colonised by Europeans with huge repercussions that we are still feeling today. We hope you enjoy episode 11 from the excellent The Tea History podcast: Europeans Discover Tea, produced by Laszlo Montgomery. Listen to the rest of The Tea History Podcast: https://bit.ly/3BnDjgr Explore Laszlo's The Chinese Sayings Podcast: https://bit.ly/3BiITAT Discover The China History Podcast: https://bit.ly/3GTekmd Sign up for the 2022 Barista League's High ..read more

Each sip of coffee we drink is steeped in dark colonial past. The reason we can enjoy it every morning is because it's relatively cheap, and many people suffered under European colonisers to create systems that produced this cheap coffee. But unfortunately, that's just the beginning. Colonialism has stripped enslaved and indigenous people of their language, pushed their descendants into work that a modern European would never do, and created racial ideologies that persist and harm people of colour to this day. In this bonus episode of A History of Coffee, documentary maker James Harper mode ..read more

We are hard at work on the bonus episode about decolonising coffee history. But...in the meantime, here's an episode from a sister podcast we think you'll enjoy. You can listen to more episodes from Adventures in Coffee here: https://bit.ly/300V4jS ..read more

Do you grind your beans fresh before brewing your coffee? If so, you are helping overturn a race-to–the-bottom with deep roots in colonial extraction that today is leaving millions of coffee farmers impoverished. Or, at least, that’s what many specialty coffee companies would like you to believe. The truth is a lot less rosy. In this final episode of A History of Coffee, Jonathan and James explore where the specialty coffee movement came from, whether it will succeed in arresting coffee’s race-to-the-bottom, and look into the future to understand what might be the future of coffee. Visit Jo ..read more