For paid subscribers: A fascinating academic paper delves into the ways Korean Buddhists, after centuries of drinking tea, have started to embrace coffee.
Demand for coffee is growing, and climate change threatens supply—yet consumers don’t want to pay more. In an intensified and unequal industry, however, someone always pays.
For paid subscribers: A fascinating academic paper delves into the ways Korean Buddhists, after centuries of drinking tea, have started to embrace coffee.
For paid subscribers: One of Howard Schultz’ final acts as Starbucks CEO was inflicting upon us a line of olive oil-infused coffee drinks. He was so confident the Oleato would change the world. It didn’t.
For paid subscribers: The coffee industry is embracing automation, and consumers increasingly demand convenience and speed. Me? I’m happy to wait for my coffee to be made by a human.
For paid subscribers: From the preposterous tech startup that wanted to roast coffee in space to espresso on the International Space Station, there’s a lot of coffee up there.
For paid subscribers: Since Elon Musk’s purchase, and especially in the wake of the Grok CSAM deepfake scandal, it has become impossible to defend staying on X. And yet, many coffee brands and organisations are still there.
For paid subscribers: Nestlé is exploring a sale of Blue Bottle, and Luckin is reportedly interested. With such different approaches to coffee, however, it’s worth asking the question: why?
For paid subscribers: Coffee is increasingly used to burnish the United Arab Emirates’ international image. Now it is being supercharged by merging with the popularity of the Dubai chocolate trend.
For paid subscribers: Blue Bottle used carbon offsets and a focus on “emissions intensity” to go carbon neutral, but its total emissions increased quite significantly. Should this "achievement" be celebrated?
Companies are turning to automation as a tool to fight back against industrial action. In coffee, that role could well be played by robot baristas—in fact, it sort of already has.
For paid subscribers: Today, Sweden is famous for its love of coffee. But historically that hasn’t always been the case, and one particular ruler’s attempts to prove coffee’s harmful health impacts may have been the world’s first randomised controlled trial.
