Walk into a Viennese café, ask simply for "a coffee," and you will most likely get a question back. In English, Vienna coffee means strong coffee under a cap of whipped cream; in Vienna, that drink has its own name, and so does every other cup on the menu.
A coffee tree is an evergreen of the coffee family, Rubiaceae, and every coffee bean you have ever brewed is one of its seeds. Following a coffee plant from seed to bean means following a cycle measured in years before the first crop, and in months for every cherry after that.
The coffee flavor wheel is the circle of colored words that roasters, baristas and coffee buyers use to name what they taste. It looks like a chart of what is inside your cup, but it is really a map of something else: how a group of professional tasters sorts the words they use to describe coffee.
Roasting your own coffee takes less gear than you might think: a hot-air popcorn popper, a metal colander and a scale. You learn to roast by ear, from the popcorn-like first crack to the quieter second crack.
Coffee reached Europe by the 17th century: Venice had it by 1615, and Marseille received its first beans in 1644. Travelers' reports came first; by the end of the 1680s, Venice, Marseille, Paris and Vienna were all selling it by the cup.
Arabica vs robusta is usually told as a rivalry: the refined highland coffee against the cheap, bitter lowland one. The botany tells a closer story, because the robusta species is one of arabica's two parents.
Ethiopian coffee regions are best known by the names on the bag: Yirgacheffe, Sidama, Guji, Harar, Limu and western names such as Lekempti. Those names are trade labels as much as places, and the cup depends on processing as much as on where the coffee grew.
Typica coffee is a variety of the arabica coffee plant, Coffea arabica, often described as one of the oldest arabica varieties. If you have tasted Jamaica Blue Mountain or a Kona from Hawaii, you have very likely tasted Typica under another name.
Ask when coffee came to England and you get four answers, each defended as the right one. Someone drank coffee in Oxford around 1637, Oxford's first coffeehouse opened around 1650 to 1651, London's in 1652, and a rival Oxford house in 1654.
Conilon coffee is often described as robusta with a Brazilian accent, but the botany tells a more interesting story. Conilon is one genetic group of the species Coffea canephora, and robusta, in the strict sense, is a sister group of the same species.
The coffeehouse is at least five centuries old. By the late 1600s it had moved from Mecca to Istanbul, Oxford, London and Paris, and nearly everywhere it went, someone in power tried to close it.
Before Java or the Caribbean grew any coffee, the port of Mocha, Yemen, was the main marketplace where merchants from three continents came to buy it. The harbor lost that trade long ago, but its name still sits on coffee bags and café menus.