For some time now, I have had the habit of looking at the altitude on the packaging when I buy specialty coffee. What started as a curious detail became a serious obsession: I began to notice that higher-altitude coffees had more complex, more vibrant profiles, and I wanted to understand why. I thoroughly researched the…
It had always seemed obvious to me that bees and coffee were connected, but I hadn’t looked into just how close that relationship is until I started researching for this article. I discovered that the caffeine in coffee flower nectar not only attracts bees, but also improves their olfactory memory—it literally makes them better pollinators.…
One afternoon, I was left holding my coffee after a long meeting. It had gone cold, I heated it in the microwave, and at the first sip I noticed that rough, acidic bitterness we all know so well. I started researching what exactly happens at the chemical level when we reheat coffee, and I found…
When I was studying the history of coffee, I came across one of the most dramatic episodes in global coffee cultivation: the leaf rust that devastated Ceylon’s plantations in the 19th century and turned the island, which was one of the world’s major coffee producers, into what we now mainly know as a tea-exporting country.…