The release of millions of Jeffrey Epstein's emails uncovered volumes of sordid information. They also revealed more banal details—like his coffee habits.
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The release of millions of Jeffrey Epstein's emails uncovered volumes of sordid information. They also revealed more banal details—like his coffee habits.
Jeffrey Epstein drank Aeropress coffee. He may have also drunk coffee made with a Hario V60. And for a time, he paid for a specialty coffee subscription.
Mentions of both brewers, plus recipes and instructions on how to use them, appear in the Epstein files—the tranche of documents released by the United States Department of Justice—alongside other quotidian details relating to his coffee habits.
There are bank transactions listing purchases at Starbucks, Intelligentsia Coffee, and Nespresso. Photos from 2019 of the New York financier and notorious child sex offender’s Manhattan townhouse show two Aeropresses, a Baratza grinder, a Bonavita kettle, and a Nespresso machine.
There is a queasy banality to these details, and, for some coffee drinkers, also an uncomfortable feeling of recognition. The idea that someone like Epstein could have been a coffee bro, or at least invested thought into the habit, is unnerving to consider. “Ah shit we have the same grinder”, one Redditor posted under the photo of Epstein’s kitchen.
More notable than his coffee preferences, however, is the fact that Epstein spent years developing relationships with hedge fund, venture capital, and Silicon Valley investor bigwigs. Some of those same connections poured money into coffee during the 2010s investment boom, and collectively, they’ve had a significant influence on the wider industry.
While the documents do not allege wrongdoing on the part of those included, they show that many maintained relationships with Epstein after his first conviction in 2008, and up until his second arrest, conviction, and death in 2019. More broadly, they reveal the mechanisms by which money and power are wielded—and offer yet another reminder that the transnational capitalist class dominates nearly every aspect of our world, coffee included.
Crimes, Convictions, and Cover-Ups
Epstein was a multimillionaire financier who built a fortune, and a wide-ranging circle of powerful and famous confidants, over the course of decades. Throughout his career, he trafficked and sexually abused hundreds of girls and women in Florida, New York, and on his private island in the Caribbean.
Epstein was first convicted on state charges in 2008, and given an 18-month prison sentence that the reporter Julie K. Brown called “one of the most lenient deals for a serial child sex offender in history”. It was Brown’s investigative work for the Miami Herald in 2018 that prompted federal prosecutors to look again at Epstein’s crimes, and he was eventually arrested on federal charges of sex trafficking and conspiracy to traffic minors in 2019. Epstein pleaded not guilty, but died in custody while awaiting trial. His death was ruled a suicide, although other theories abound.
In November 2025, U.S. legislators passed a law that mandated the release of files relating to the Epstein case, and over the next several months the Department of Justice (sort of) complied. At the time, Rep. Kelly Morrison read a letter from 20 of Epstein’s victims on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. “Jeffrey Epstein abused hundreds of women. The United States Government itself held evidence that he had sexually abused 40 children. Some of us are those children”, the letter read in part. “We implore you to stop protecting those who enabled Epstein’s crimes and instead stand firm in protecting the women and children he harmed. Stand up against abuse of power”.
The releases have led to resignations and firings of prominent people, as well as criminal cases against, among others, the former Prince Andrew. The millions of documents also detail Epstein’s involvement with global business, political, and academic elite. “The files are an unflattering glimpse into the real ways that wealth is accumulated and power is brokered”, J Oliver Conroy wrote in the Guardian.
They also detail Epstein’s often banal existence. For example, there are 7,481 results for the word “coffee” in the files. Some of these mentions reference planned coffee dates, or are discussions with his pilot about installing a coffee maker on one of his aeroplanes. Seven hundred of the results are regarding coffee tables. Other times, they include instructions on how to brew with a Hario V60.
‘You Are Nuts’
On July 9, 2013, the Japanese venture capitalist and entrepreneur Joichi Ito sent an email to Epstein and one of his associates, Jen Kalin. In the message, Ito outlined the step-by-step process of making coffee with a V60, including water temperature and grind setting. “I’ll show you when I see you”, Ito wrote, “but here are the details of doing the coffee in case you want to try”.
Ito also recommended coffee from Intelligentsia Coffee and Tonx, the subscription service that eventually sold to Blue Bottle, and linked to various pieces of coffee equipment. Someone with a redacted email address then emailed Epstein, asking if they should order any of the equipment. “no”, Epstein replied. He also replied to Ito, writing, “you are nuts”.
“It’s surreal to appear in the files, but I’ve always said coffee is a thing that connects people across vast geographic, cultural, and class divides—and I suppose moral divides too”, says Tonx founder (and paid Pourover subscriber) Tony Konecny. He tells me that he isn’t particularly surprised that Tonx is mentioned, because at the time “there weren’t many other roasters who were focused on direct-to-consumer. If you bought beans on the internet in 2012, the odds were high they came from us”.
As well as the V60 recipe, a month later Ito sent Epstein his recommendation for an Aeropress recipe, plus links to recent championship winners’ recipes. “I think the aeropress is a great little device to experiment and find something you like, rather than following the perfect recipe someone else developed”, he wrote.
And, while Epstein didn’t seem taken with the V60, he was apparently interested in the Aeropress. That September, Karyna Shuliak, whom LeMonde described as simultaneously Epstein’s “lover, manager and dependent”, wrote in an email that “For his coffee we are now using aeropress, it is a plastic thing”.
Ito, who had been the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab since 2011, was forced to resign in 2019 after his financial connections to Epstein were revealed. Ito had taken $1.7 million from Epstein over the years, including $1.2 million that he put towards his own investment funds. In the New Yorker, Ronan Farrow wrote that Epstein served as “an intermediary between the lab and other wealthy donors, soliciting millions of dollars in donations from individuals and organizations, including the technologist and philanthropist Bill Gates and the investor Leon Black”.
In an article on Media Lab’s website, Ito wrote that “I take full responsibility for my error in judgment. I am deeply sorry to the survivors, to the Media Lab, and to the MIT community for bringing such a person into our network”.
Epstein, Venture Capital, and Coffee
Epstein worked hard over the years to develop relationships with a host of famous, powerful, and influential people. “You have some of the most wealthy individuals, tech leaders, finance leaders, politicians, all implicated in some way, having emailed him, wanting to go to Epstein’s island, knowing that Epstein was a pedophile”, said Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna on NBC.
Some have also affected coffee production and trade directly. The Gates Foundation has funded several coffee sustainability projects in Africa. And Musk’s ransacking of the federal government using the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency”, particularly the dismantling of USAID, directly impacted coffee-related projects around the world.
Multinationals, their executives, and venture capital powerbrokers have played an outsized role in shaping modern coffee. They have successfully worked to capture the industry’s ever-increasing profits at the expense of workers, farmers, and consumers, using corporate philanthropy to shield themselves from criticism and regulation. While only a few are linked directly to Epstein, they are all members of what sociologists refer to as the transnational capitalist class.
“The Epstein case is only the tip of the iceberg”, wrote the sociology professor Dahlia Namian in The Conversation. “It reveals a global system that treats bodies, land and resources as things to exploit and discard for profit”.
‘I Wonder What Coffee They Serve in Hell?’
Epstein used his connections across business, politics, and academia to rehabilitate his reputation after his first conviction. “His reinvention, after he pleaded guilty to prostitution-related charges in Florida in 2008, would never have been possible without this often anti-democratic, self-congratulatory elite, which, even when it didn’t traffic people, took the world for a ride”, the author Anand Giridharadas wrote in the New York Times.
Over the past decade or so, the coffee industry has become ever more intertwined with venture capital and big investment money, and has changed as a result of that involvement. This influx of cash has, in some ways, democratised access to specialty coffee. More people are familiar with, and can access, flat whites and cold brew than ever before. However, it has also served to flatten coffee culture into a bland, homogenised experience, one that benefits the transnational capitalist class at the expense of everyone else.
Of course, there are thousands of venture capital firms and hedge funds, and only a handful are invested in coffee. An even smaller handful of them are connected to Epstein in some way. But it is this big-money, transnational, corporate approach to business—the “neoliberal-era power elite”, as Giridharadas described them—that now dominates almost every industry, including coffee.
Epstein drank a lot of coffee, although how invested he was in the minutiae of coffee nerddom is difficult to say. There’s no evidence he actually made the coffee himself—he was a multimillionaire, after all, and had a crew of assistants who seem to have done the actual brewing.
In a 2017 email to a redacted address, Shuliak details “Mr. Epstein’s coffee instructions”. The process, using what Shuliak calls an “airpress”, involves an inverted recipe, an “almost full packet of sweet&low”, and heated half and half. While he toyed with specialty coffee for at least a time, the files indicate that the majority of Epstein’s coffee consumption was of a much lower quality.
“It seems like he was ultimately more of an Illy and Lavazza drinker, at least on the island”, Konecny says. “I wonder what coffee they serve in hell?”
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I'm a coffee writer and creator of The Pourover. Based in Scotland, I have over a decade of experience in the specialty coffee industry. Ask me about coffeewashing. It's pronounced Fin (he/him)
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