Located on the southern west coast of Africa, Angola was once a leading powerhouse in coffee production. In the 1970s, the country produced more than 230,000 tons of coffee annually and used to compete with Uganda and Côte d’Ivoire for the top coffee exporter position in Africa. By 2017, according to the United Nations Agency for Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Angola had produced 8,000 tons of misery.
But now after nearly 22 years of peace, the country is bouncing back with the Angolan government investing $12 million and private companies expanding into the global market once again, led by Café Cazengo which is considered one of the most dynamic coffee producers in the agricultural heartland east of Angolan capital, Luanda.
Coffee and the Fight for Independence in Angola
Angola is located on the southwest coast of the African continent between Namibia (to the south) and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (to the north). This massive country—roughly twice the size of Texas—was once a significant producer of coffee, and coffee workers played an important role in the fight for Angolan independent from Portuguese colonial rule. The strike in Baixa do Cassange in 1961 was a major early moment in Angola’s violent and complicated colonial breakup, in which African workers sharpened their machetes—but not for tending to the shrubs. 14 years later, Angola gained independence but also fell into a brutal and protracted civil war. According to a 1985 article by the New York Times, 90 percent of Europeans had fled the country and by 1985, coffee production had crippled to five percent of the colonial time’s figures. After the coffee plantation owners and agronomists fled Angola (most of them to Brazil), the coffee that was grown especially in the country’s lush, green highlands—primarily robusta, which once provided half of the nation’s foreign exchange earnings—quickly went into neglect and became fallow.
Café Cazengo a Pioneer in Coffee Production in Angola
“Café Cazengo started as an idea way before we implemented,” Elba Teresa Albino Jorge dos Santos de Oliveira, the company’s General Manager, tells Sprudge. “In fact, it was already a way of life ingrained in the family before Angola became independent. Our parents were coffee growers, and they made a living producing coffee and selling to the Portuguese in exchange for durable goods and even food.”
Café Cazengo was launched in 2009. The brand pays homage to the place where the first Angolan coffee plant was allegedly placed in the early 1830s (by the Brazilians), and as a way to revive the former glory that the area had in coffee production, with these efforts still visible today. Coffee export was what oil export is to the country today. However, the company needed local support to succeed.
Elba Teresa Albino Jorge dos Santos de Oliveira
“We couldn’t go alone, so we started forming partnerships with old coffee growers that had stopped harvesting their old plants due to lack of demand,” de Oliveira says. “Today, we are the pioneers in reviving the coffee industry in Angola, in Kwanza Norte province. And for that, we have achieved our goal. Coffee production today has increased dramatically, and we see more and more young people interested in producing coffee as the sales revenues help improve their lives.”
Before the project started, there was minimal coffee with all production coming from coffee trees over 50 years old. The areas where these trees grew were inaccessible, requiring a 4×4 just to reach the growing sites. According to the Oliveira, coffee farmers in Angola still farmed some of these crops for their own personal consumption, and only in very small amounts. Cafe Czengo acquired one of these old farms and started reclaiming the timeworn coffee plants. They did this by hiring young people in the nearby villages and using the older ones to teach them how to tend coffee. As a result, the area saw a huge increase in coffee production–and with it, increased interest from coffee buyers.
Café Cazengo and Coffee Value Addition
Exporting raw coffee beans has been a problem and a drawback in Africa for a long time. To make the project more profitable and sustainable, Café Cazengo started a coffee processing plant for value addition. At its core, Cazengo is a family business, and export was always the original objective, but the ability to process and sell coffees domestically and internationally has been transformative for their vision. They’ve acquired the gear they need to do it—a coffee huller from Brazil, a roast from Portugal, a capsule machine from Italy, and coffee bags from South Africa—and today they’re the only company making capsules (which work in Nespresso machines) in the country of Angola. Their longterm goal is to get into the United States market and grow export opportunities further.
Café Cazengo is considered a medium enterprise in Angola with a production capacity of about 60 tons of roasted coffee annually. To serve society, the company offers original and organic coffee products striving to create the original Angolan coffee taste, dubbing it the “Essence of the Angolan Coffee.”
Today, Café Cazengo offers roasted coffee beans, ground coffee, and coffee capsules. With the global trend of adding original and imaginative flavors to alcoholic products like orange flavor in whiskey and cinnamon flavor in beer, Café Cazengo produces a coffee-flavored beer called Cerveja Cazengo.
Boosting Local Coffee Production and economy, and Encouraging the Youth
Café Cazengo supports local coffee production by sourcing most of its coffee directly from over 500 local smallholder coffee farms. Although they are reviving their acquired old coffee farm, what comes from it is insignificant compared to the demand they are having.
“When we started, our suppliers were old, most of them over 70 years,” Oliveira says. “Young people by then didn’t believe that it was possible to make a living producing coffee. Today, the numbers are different. More young people are getting on board and in fact, the numbers have inverted. [Now] most coffee farmers are young. They have small plots where they grow their coffee, mainly on the back of their houses. The sale of coffee is not a business [to them] but a way to survive and buy goods they can’t produce, mainly industrial goods.” Oliveira tells Sprudge.
Apart from offering ingenious coffee products, the company is creating job opportunities, especially for the young people coming out of universities. Café Cazengo provides a program where young people are given three-month training in its facilities to learn about coffee processing. At the end of the program, these youths get the opportunity to be hired and be part of the cafe’s team. In the future, the company also has a plan to introduce a coffee training academy to elevate Angola coffee production to the next level and continue improving the quality of the coffee that is produced in the country.
The company is also setting up a cooperative for the farmers with the help of a local university. Once the cooperative is in place, the farmers will be organized and in a better position to receive grants from the government and other institutions.
Looking Ahead
In the past, Café Cazengo has attracted recognition from other quarters such as invitations to various events in Washington D.C. by the Angolan embassy, which has prominently recognized the work the company is doing in taking Angola’s name to the world. Currently, the company’s long-term objective is to become Angola’s largest exporter of coffee.
“We believe that Angola can recover its place lost during the long civil war that ravaged the country,” Oliveira tells me. For that happen, further investments are needed into infrastructure, and to draw on R&D being done by other leading coffee countries—in particular, Brazil, with whom the Angolans share a common language. Cazengo’s growth dreams are impressive—and with 1000 hectares set to develop in the short term, these are very promising times for the company, and for Angolan coffee at large. “For us, 2025 is the year,” Oliveira tells me. You can believe him.
Daniel Muraga is an anthropologist and freelance journalist based in Nairobi.
A couple years ago, I was visiting a coffee roaster in Odense, Denmark when I encountered a bag of beans titled simply, “Women’s Coffee.” This was the only bag from six to eight roasts named after something other than local neighborhoods in the city. “What’s ‘women’s coffee’?” I asked them. As it turns out, the roaster sourced these coffee beans from a women’s cooperative. Still, I began to suspect that lofty phrases like “empowering women in coffee” rely on certain abstract ideals—things we collectively believe we understand, but which we haven’t clearly defined or discussed enough.
According to the 2018 International Coffee Organization report “Gender Equality in the Coffee Sector,” women perform around 70% of labor in coffee production. The latter figure varies by region: from 50-80% in Vietnam, to 65-70% in Ethiopia, and 75% in Colombia. At the same time, between 20-30% of coffee farms are female-operated.
Women’s outsized contributions in the male-dominated trade of coffee reflects the phenomenon researcher Dr. Erika Koss calls the “gendered coffee paradox.” Deeply-ingrained gender roles hinder how women view their own value, says photographer and storyteller Lucía Bawot. She visited 62 women for her 2023 book “We Belong: An Anthology of Colombian Women Coffee Farmers,” which aimed to make women’s invisible labor, visible. “They’d tell me, ‘My story is not really important. Do you want to talk to my husband?’” Bawot says. “They didn’t feel capable.”
From roastery websites to coffee conferences to the’ Instagrams of coffee farmers like Rituales Café and Java Halu Coffee, there is a growing movement that aims to “empower women”—but how much of it is just talk?
Ana Maria Donneys
Women coffee farmers
Ana Maria Donneys, owner of Café Primitivo, is a fifth-generation caficultora (coffee grower) in Armenia, Colombia. “Men always managed the farms in my family,” Donneys says. “Because my grandfather had two daughters and I was his only grandchild, only women could continue, if we wanted to.”
Other male farm owners expected her mother and aunt to sell the land—so at 26 years old, Donneys decided to take over management of six farms. But the male farm workers were resistant to her desire to shift production to value coffee quality over quantity. “I couldn’t walk alone in the fields because they would start whistling,” Donneys says.
Now 30, Donneys is a Q Grader finishing her Master’s in Coffee Agribusiness. Before Primitivo had a coffee lab, she’d invite male employees to the (literal) cupping table—and once the coffee won higher prices, they realized she’d been right. “I needed results to earn their respect,” she says.
Donneys believes she entered coffee at a time when there are many more opportunities for young, English-speaking women, accompanied by the education to create a brand around their coffee. But it’s still uncommon for women to have this level of decision-making power.
Women perform various often-overlapping roles on coffee farms, including planting seedlings, weeding fields, picking ripe cherries, and preparing them for storage and transport. Ethiolatin research found that Ethiopian women contribute 81% of sowing, 100% of harvesting, 98% of land preparation, and 92% of transportation—much of which has historically, and uncharitably, been called “unskilled labor.” That extends to the particularly undervalued work of kitchen staff on farm dynamics: both women and men told Bawot they choose seasonal farm labor based on the cafeteria’s food quality.
Historically, gender roles have been shaped by disparities in land ownership laws. “Many women aren’t seen as coffee farmers because they can’t sell the coffee under their name,” says Bawot. Some women inherit farms after male relatives die naturally, as in Donneys’ case. In countries that have seen violent conflict like Rwanda and Colombia, women have inherited farms after male relatives were killed. In Kenya, where women provide 80% of agricultural labor, they own only 1% of land with a single title, compared to 18.6% in neighboring Rwanda and 36% in Colombia.
Many countries are introducing land-policyreforms to address gender inequality—but it’s not an automatic fix. When Costa Rican coffee producer Marianella Báez Jost and her American husband bought Café Con Amor in 2013, she says, “I had to shop for a farm with my brother and dad […] Men are the negotiators in the eyes of this society.” She later joined the Board of Directors of the local International Women’s Coffee Alliance (IWCA), an organization with a stated vision to “be the leader of empowerment and equity for all women in coffee.”
Marianella Báez Jost at IWCA Chicago 2025
She’s one of many women committed to pushing progress. Yellow Rooster Coffee Imports Relationship Manager Sara Bedoya co-founded the IWCA Colombia chapter in 2021, and later started what she calls an Antioquía sister association in 2023. She now advises 60 women on branding and potential clients alongside her full-time job.
Sara Bedoya
Although their husbands are the main landowners, the women find space to advance. “They went from working in the kitchen to going to school to learn about management, marketing, and sales,” Bedoya says. “I see myself as a bridge for them.”
How we view “empowerment”
From the US to Colombia and Ethiopia, the perception of “empowerment” varies between cultural contexts. Bedoya says it feels stronger in Spanish, whereas it’s been watered down in English. “It’s like, ‘This latte empowers me to go about my day,’” she jokes. “Latin culture is very machista, so when I say I empower women, and other women empower me, it’s like we are making a difference in history.”
“In Ethiopia, making women equal participants in coffee would be like an oxymoron because they’re the dominant participants,” says Dagmawi I.E., CEO of Eshi Safaris LLC and director of programs for Grounds for Health, which has provided women’s health programs in coffee-growing communities since 1996. His wife owns a roastery in Addis Abeba. “But the support they need for equitable participation is very different.”
Dagmawi I.E.
Although motherhood is still Ethiopian women’s biggest leverage to influence discourse, they don’t see themselves as “victims,” he says. “As a society, we’re increasingly aware that I should get access because of me, not because of my husband.”
Essentially, empowerment is about how we wield it: There is a big difference between whether women are empowered, or whether they empower themselves.
“The agriculture industry has an interest and a role supporting greater levels of female autonomy, agency, and empowerment,” says Greg Meenahan, strategic advisor and program developer at Equal Origins. Doing it right, however, takes concerted effort. “We have to involve men and boys in these conversations, but they don’t have the right to give or not give empowerment,” says Meenahan. “Empowerment is when women with agency and knowledge take part in decision-making [while] not restricted by time poverty.” In fact, women’s time is spread so thin across agricultural and domestic responsibilities that they often don’t have time to participate in initiatives aiming to empower them, he says.
Promoting gender equity means moving beyond programs to improve coffee yield or quality towards a holistic understanding of the factors affecting women—which is why Equal Origins developed the Gender Equity Index (GEI) for use in the coffee and cacao supply chains. The tool assesses participating coffee businesses across five granular categories, and rates their performance against industry benchmarks. It’s based on the “Reach, Benefit, Empower, and Transform” framework that lays out a roadmap for scalable impact, from efforts to include women at a basic level; to meeting their health, income, and other needs for well-being; to strengthening their decision-making abilities and participation; and finally to shifting gendered attitudes at a community level.
“The teams we work are predominantly men,” says Meenahan. “Using the GEI, teams shift gender equity from being someone else’s job, to being clearly defined within the context of each member’s role, duties, and responsibility on the team.”
Marketing empowerment
Coffee companies have different methods for supporting women coffee producers. “We’re doing the bare minimum [and] using our purchasing power as roasters and retailers to shift the narrative in support of women,” says Jenny Ulbricht, who founded East View Coffee Company in 2020 with women’s empowerment in mind. “Coffee value is more than a number on a tasting notes sheet. There are people behind that number and the truth is, most of those people are women,” she says. East View now sources 90% of coffee from women producers—including Marianella Báez Jost—up from an initial 50%.
Jenny Ulbricht
Meanwhile, Kahawa 1893 has adapted a Kenyan “table banking” model that allows consumers to directly tip women producers during checkout and/or via QR code on the coffee packaging. Founder Margaret Nyamumbo says the company has raised $90,000 since 2017 by matching $45,000 in customer tips.
Today, says Meenahan, “women owners are among the most visible women in the supply chain, especially compared to the women who co-farms with her husband.” The coffee industry’s complicated dynamics, however, lead him to caution that “a woman-owned farm doesn’t necessarily mean that the farm is more or less gender equitable than any other farm.”
In addition, the marketing around empowerment concerns some producers. “In my opinion, it doesn’t matter if you’re buying directly from a female-owned coffee farm if you’re not paying attention to the damage caused by climate change in coffee-producing regions and consistently low prices,” which often don’t cover cost of production, says Karla Boza, a coffee producer and Q Grader at Finca San Antonio Amatepec in El Salvador.
The empowerment that women need
The industry must urgently ensure coffee farming remains environmentally and financially sustainable for farmers. When asked about the support they need most, women most commonly mentioned access to credit.
Amanda Bravo
Amanda Bravo co-founded Rituales Café in Medellín, Colombia, as a social impact venture in 2017, when she was frequently mistaken as her male co-founders’ employee. Bravo says she’s since broken the paradigm: Customers are now more accepting of women in management. Rituales now employs 80% women, but still faces challenges. “Finding banks that finance women’s businesses in Colombia isn’t easy, nor does the government offer much aid,” she says.
Microfinance programs have shown promise. “Microfinance just isn’t a sexy thing to talk about, but it has a huge impact,” says Amaris Gutierrez-Rey, VP of Coffee at Joe Coffee Company.
Amaris Gutierrez Rey
Women also want opportunities to share knowledge with other women, like Bean Voyage’s Women-Powered Coffee Summit where Bawot and Koss connected, or through the IWCA network that connects 14,000+ women across the value chain, including Bedoya and Donneys. “Empowerment is having a community,” Donneys says. “It’s how I feel strong.”
Empowerment for everyone
Despite coffee’s unambiguously inequitable colonial history, Nyamumbo, Dagmawi I.E., and Meenahan have all called it “a tool for impact/empowerment.”
Far from overshadowing the need to pay everyone in coffee production at least a living income, women’s empowerment is key to the solution. “Any conversation about equitable value distribution needs to incorporate gender equity,” says Gutierrez-Rey, adding, “No sustainable climate solutions are without gender equity in the equation.” The conversation is stifled, however, by a persistent lack of current gender data, which Gutierrez-Rey highlighted through the Women in Coffee Project.
As for “empowerment,” Dr. Koss suggests “accompaniment,” or “walking alongside,” as an alternative. But not everyone will agree on the language, or the right way to do it.
“Women are not a monolith,” Bawot says, and she’s right—even the women in this article differ! Bawot herself says she will no longer buy coffee marketed as produced by women—because coffee is inherently produced by women.
“I think we need to stop putting the value of women coffee farmers in their gender,” she says. Then, she channels the future she’d like to see: “You should be helping me because I’m a capable farmer, just like my husband, my cousin, and my uncle—and pay me for the labor that adds value to that coffee.”
Large trucks laden with imported goods rumble up Madagascar’s Route Nationale 2 from the coastal city of Toamasina to the highland capital of Antananarivo. They skirt along the densely forested, tropical coast before zig zagging their way up the island’s eastern mountains onto the dry central plateau. Along the way, the drivers stop at a hotely, a sort of restaurant-truck-stop, to rest, eat, and drink. Alongside pork stewed in crushed cassava leaves, native red rice, and freshly made donuts, coffee is a staple at the Malagasy hotely.
At most establishments, the proprietress and her staff process the coffee from seed to cup. They roast the green coffee in a pan over charcoal until nearly burnt, grind it by pounding in a large wooden mortar and pestle, and filter it through a woven tanty kafé, or coffee basket. The truckers take the dark brew in small cups infused with spoons of sugar and long pours of canned condensed milk. Suitably stimulated by their coffee break, they climb back up into their semi cabs and disappear around another of the highway’s sinuous turns.
Coffee has been a commercial commodity and a daily drink on the island of Madagascar since the 1800s, but the last several decades have seen domestic production of coffee disintegrate with exports out of the port of Toamasina drying up. Nowadays, though, new private commercial endeavors like the Madagascar Coffee Company and government research led by FOFIFA (Madagascar’s National Center for Applied Research in Rural Development) are pushing the coffee industry towards a timely revival, buoyed by the island’s unique geography and unparalleled biodiversity. Madagascar, in fact, is home to more distinct species of coffee than anywhere else on the planet.
Production of coffee in Madagascar first took root due to French investment in coffee on the nearby island of Réunion in the 1720s. By the 1820s, the ruling Merina tribe of Madagascar was collaborating with Réunion planters to develop an industry around the highland capital. Plantations in the tropical southeastern coast followed shortly thereafter. By the 1920s, coffee grown along the coast was one of colonial French Madagascar’s most consequential exports alongside rice, raw cowhides, and vanilla (even surpassing vanilla in the 1930s.) Nearly 100% of coffee exports at the time went to France, where the colonial commodity was imported duty free.
But the coffee industry was divided geographically and ethnically. In the highlands, native Malagasy smallholders grew Arabica in the few regions with suitable climate and soil. On the coast, larger French interests maintained vast plantations of Robusta, such as the French-owned Compagnie Marseillaise de Madagascar which possessed over half a million trees in the southeastern Mananjary district during the 1950s. As plantations of this size have collapsed over the decades of Malagasy independence and more recent political and economic instability, the commercial coffee industry has fallen off. In 1990, Madagascar exported over 47 million kilograms of coffee. By 2010, that figure had reduced to just 8 million kilograms—the infrastructure that supported commercial coffee production decayed proportionally.
Ryan Kelley and Jim Hazen have spent the last couple of years co-founding the Madagascar Coffee Company. “Operating in Madagascar is challenging for many reasons,” says Kelley, “The industry is being rebuilt from aggregating from farmers to putting in processing centers like wet mills. There is no dry miller in Madagascar. Typically, a coffee company is going to focus on one or two of those steps, and we have to focus on all of them. The coffee sector needs to be rebuilt starting from pruning and stumping old trees, planting new trees, all the way through building companies along the supply chain.”
The new company just completed its first year of harvest this past season from June through August. They source Robusta from the historical commercial center along the southeastern coast from Mananjary down to Farafangana. Their Arabica, on the other hand, is aggregated from smallholders with anywhere from 15 to 50 trees in geographical batches from the Itasy, Amoron’i Mania, and Haute Matsiatra regions in the plateau.
Kelley and Hazen aim at reintroducing Malagasy coffee to consumers around the world—from Japan to Europe, from the UK to the US. “We’ve developed a light medium roast for the Arabicas that our customers have really gravitated to,“ says Kelley of their first harvest’s offerings “Madagascar tends to be a fairly sweet coffee, and we are getting some nice citrus notes on the lighter roasts. On the Robusta side, we have been doing some natural processed Robustas and then doing some espresso blends. It brings out the acidity, while giving it a chocolate-covered cherry effect from the natural processing.” The country has the potential to produce specialty coffee of excellent character and quality. In 2007, a coffee from Madagascar won the African Taste of Harvest competition hosted by the African Fine Coffees Association (AFCA.)
And Madagascar has more to offer coffee producers. Kelley adds, “Whenever we talk to people in the coffee industry, they’re like ‘Wow, Madagascar is home to so many different varieties of coffee. Almost all of the coffee species are in Madagascar.’ There’s a lot of great work happening at FOFIFA both as a seed bank but also research. We are excited about what we can do in terms of adapting varieties.”
Madagascar’s hidden secret is that it is home to more wild species of coffee than anywhere else on Earth. These varieties, collectively called Mascarocoffea, after the Mascarene Islands east of Madagascar, promise genetic resistance to certain pests, climate change, and even offer a natural alternative to decaf.
Dr. Mbolarinosy Rasoafalimanana Rakotomalala, Scientific Director at FOFIFA, explains, “We have a germplasm bank of all cultivated commodities. So coffee is among our responsibilities–to preserve the coffee germplasm in situ at the station of Kianjavato. It was founded by the Japanese during the time of Jean-Jacques Rakotomalala. He worked with the Japanese and the Institute of Research Development (IRD) in France. They developed improved coffee varieties together while preserving the wild species.”
The late Jean-Jacques Rakotomalala, former Director of Research at FOFIFA, spearheaded research on a variety of wild species, advocating for the preservation of the island’s genetic diversity and the hybridization of wild species with commercial varieties.
Now, Raharimalala Eva Nathalie, PhD, heads the Coffee Program at FOFIFA. According to Raharimalala, there are around 130 known species of coffee. Between 40 and 44 are endemic to mainland Africa. Another 61 are native to Madagascar. Nowhere else on Earth are there so many distinct species of coffee than Madagascar. “How can I explain why Madagascar has the most species?” asks Raharimalala, “It is not just coffee species, it is the biodiversity of Madagascar.” Indeed, the island is home to over half of the world’s chameleon species, six out of eight baobab species, and it is the exclusive residence of lemurs. Raharimalala estimates, though, that 70% of these native coffee species are in danger of extinction. At the research station in Kianjavato, they maintain living specimens of 40 of the 61 endemic coffees.
In this biodiversity, researchers see a gold mine for agricultural resilience. “We want to improve cultivated coffee to have some resistance to rust, for example, among other diseases,” says Rasoafalimanana. One species, called Bara Coffea, which grows in the northwest of Madagascar in an arid region, is particularly resistant to drought and water scarcity.
FOFIFA researchers are also working to create hybrids that will better adapt Arabica to the island’s plateau. “Arabica is cultivated in the highlands, but the adaptability of this variety is not good in Madagascar,” explains Raharimalala, “It is concentrated in the Itasy region which is a volcanic region where the soil is still rich. Also there is a microclimate that is favorable for Arabica. But the production is very low.” Researchers are in the process of testing the viability of a new variety, called Ratelo, crossed from two parents, one a hybrid of Coffea eugenioides and CoffeaCanephora and the other Coffea Arabica.
Another potential benefit is that the wild Malagasy coffees contain no caffeine. At the end of the 19th century, French naturalist Léon Humblot sent samples of native flora from the nearby Comoros Islands back to France. In 1901, the French biochemist Gabriel Bertrand showed that one such species, Coffea humblotiana, contained no caffeine. The French IRD rediscovered 100 plants of the species on the island of Mayotte in 2010.
“In Madagascar, we don’t grow wild coffee because when we taste test them, they are very bitter, and the speciation of the coffee in Madagascar does not produce caffeine, or produces a low caffeine content in all 61 species,” adds Raharimalala, “This is why we use the wild coffee in hybridization—to have a species with low caffeine content or no caffeine. As well as to have new tastes and sensory properties.” Hybrids could present a healthier and more natural alternative to low caffeine coffees, and may someday present a naturally occurring addition to the decaf market.
In both cultivated and wild species, Madagascar’s unique geography lends itself to diversity. The same climatic variables that keep Robusta on the east coast and Arabica in small pockets on the plateau have allowed coffee to speciate over millions of years on the island, adapting to regions as diverse as the coastal rainforest and the arid plateau. Unlocking the biological diversity of wild coffee could not only fuel a revival of an export industry on the island, but also lead to more climate resistant coffee farming around the world.
As I pack my bags to leave home in Delhi, India, my mother insists that I carry with me half a kilo of Tata Tea Gold and a kilo of homemade ghee. Protesting against carrying the weight of these two items, which are going to be easily available to purchase in New York City, she argues that I should not have to go searching for a familiar brand of tea when it is going to be something I need to drink the minute I enter my new home.
And I know it’s true. Chai has always been an anchor in my daily routines, giving me a much needed caffeinated push in the middle of the day. As I strive everyday to bring my fragmented self together, chai is a doting companion, reminding me of the sights and smells of my Delhi home.
My chai story is not so different from that of other South Asians who have grown up in the region or in households where preparing and partaking tea is a carefully crafted ritual everyday. Once confined to streetside stalls and South Asian homes, masala chai is now a global mainstay in the culinary world of cocktails, coffee, and desserts. Coffee shop culture in the United States turned chai into “chai tea latte”. My Indian culinary roots want to scoff at this trend, but after having lived in the country for over a couple of years, I do not find myself deriding chai latte. I do not mind consuming it while admitting that although it is not the chai of my taste, it is another spiced beverage that goes well with an alternate choice of milk.
This piece tries to grasp the presence of chai in the United States and how the country’s coffee culture has reshaped it. The study was born out of the desire to explore the trope of authenticity that is often attached to experiencing food cultures. It has also been informed by individuals of South Asian origins who are the spectators of trends around chai and chai latte. I begin my inquiry through a brief outline of the history of tea and chai in India that sets the scene to better understand the remodeling of chai to chai latte and the qualms expressed by South Asian diaspora in the country over this change.
A Brief History of Tea and Chai In India
Tea had been grown in the hills of Assam since at least the 16th century. Located in northeastern India at the foothills of Himalayas and graced by the flow of the Brahmaputra river, local tribes in Assam cultivated tea long before the British set foot in the region. However, the Empire brought its own desire and expertise for growing the crop, which is said to have been hired from China. By the mid-19th century, Assam overtook China as the primary producer and exporter of the crop, as tea had become a common drink among all classes in Britain. Different ways were devised to procure cheap labor and make laborers at tea plantations work as hard as possible.
The tea produced in Assam was meant solely for export to the West. It took time for the beverage to trickle down to the South Asian population, which was used to herb- and spice-based drinks. For a majority of the Indian population, tea was an expensive, foreign habit, another tool of oppression and an object of profit for British rule. It was also a symbol of class, as the highest quality of Assam tea was consumed by the British and Indian elite. A dip in sales after the Great Depression of the 1930s and the potential for making more profits from the Indian population as consumers of tea inspired the British to begin a countrywide marketing campaign to convince Indians to drink tea. Low grade tea was distributed for free and specific directions were given on how it should be brewed. It is interesting to note how such “correct” ways of making a cup of tea were disregarded by locals, who instead preferred to prepare their tea with lots of milk and sugar, the taste of which was appealing to Indians who were used to drinking dairy based beverages.
Chai brewing at home.Adding milk.Straining mixture into a mug.
Indians adapted tea brewing methods to create chai. Preparing tea by using the low-grade leaves, water, milk and sugar in a single pot through high heat and letting the mixture simmer for a few minutes for rich taste and thick texture became the preferred method. Spicing the tea made it masala chai as ginger, green cardamom, black pepper, cinnamon, fennel, and cloves along with sugar were added to enrich and complement the taste of the bitter black concoction. At present, not only every culture, region, or household, but even individuals across South Asia and its diaspora are said to have their own recipe for chai. The diverse fragrant spicy cups are telling the histories of families, cultures, and nations. It is through the presence of chai and its chaiwallahs, that South Asians toast to their routine, one small cup at a time.
Chai Versus Chai Latte
The history of chai latte in the west could be traced back roughly to the 1960s when travelers returning from the “hippie trail” brought it back with them. In the 1990s Starbucks launched its own version of a chai latte, which lead to widespread popularity. In a coffee-drinking culture, chai became popular and was claimed as a “healthy” alternative to coffee, given the comparatively smaller amount of caffeine and the medicinal qualities of herbs and spices used in the brew. The market for chai latte has grown since then, with its own place in the menus of coffee shops across the country.
The pitting of chai against chai latte is better understood through the meanings that individuals of South Asian origins attach to their everyday cups of chai. For the purpose of my study, my informants were South Asian food business owners, chefs, and food writers who are directly or indirectly involved in preparing chai, making decisions about its flavor, writing about it, and moreover have shared a nostalgic connection with the beverage.
Tea tasting in Assam.
The South Asian immigrant experience with chai is deeply rooted in the memory of a place and its people. Chai is more than just an everyday beverage, characterized by an emotional and evocative tone that can be traced back to nostalgia and a sense of place. The desire to remember home and their loved ones through the typical recipes of chai is a meaningful way of approaching the past, reinforcing identity, cultural boundaries, and a sense of uniqueness. Making chai over the stove is considered authentic, dynamic, and performative.
In the context of chai, the participants of this study believe that inauthentic versions of chai—such as what is often served as “chai latte”—exist in the market, and it is their responsibility to bring in the real product. They demonstrate what the “original” chai tastes like and adapt it to the framework and convenience of restaurants/delis/coffee shops in the city. They wish to set the peripheries of this authenticity.
As chai latte tries to fit in the category of chai, there is resistance. Since chai is adapted into the cafe culture of America and “latte-ized”, the knowledge of ingredients that goes into its making, techniques, tools, and flavors are used by the immigrant South Asians to assess its originality. However, chai in coffee shop culture has to be adapted for quick service that calls for an instant preparation as opposed to a slow boiling of the mixture over a stove. An iced version has to be an option too in these cafe settings, often accompanied by whipped cream and a sprinkle of spices.
As the participants hold fast to their meanings and versions of chai, they recognize the existence of the form their beloved beverage has acquired due to forces which are well beyond their control. They accept a product of their culture in a foreign market, but the power to make decisions and the ability to display the true flavors of chai is what they demand for themselves.
The metamorphosis of British tea into chai resulted from a visceral and emotional investment into the drink by South Asians, with every region—and every household, and even individuals within those households—fashioning their own highly distinct recipe. While there cannot be only one best way to make chai, there is pushback from members of the South Asian community towards the popular chai recipes and concentrates found throughout America. This is to be expected, and it makes sense. Critique of chai is part of the culture of chai, here as back home, and nobody’s favorite way is the best for another.
As for myself, like nearly all the participants I spoke with, I acknowledge the existence of chai lattes. I even partake in them occasionally in my life in New York. But I still need a homemade cup of chai to ground me everyday as I continue to warm up to the idea of a home away from home.
Navdeep Kaur is a freelance journalist based in New York City. This is Navdeep Kaur’s first feature for Sprudge.
Acidity in coffee can be a confusing topic. Many people—perhaps especially those who are less familiar with specialty coffee—might immediately think of stomach acidity when they hear the term. It’s only natural, then, to relate the notion of “acidity” to how drinking coffee can sometimes make them feel. If I drink too much coffee first thing in the morning on an empty stomach, aren’t I experiencing acidity?
When coffee professionals refer to acidity, they are talking about sensory traits. But even still, it’s a commonly used—and commonly misunderstood—term up and down the coffee industry, and it begs the much bigger question: What actually is acidity in coffee? How does it impact flavor?
Fortunately, we have access to experts. One such flavor expert is Veronica Belchior, a biologist with an MSc in Ecology, a Ph.D. in Food Science and currently working on her postdoctoral degree in Food Science. She is also a Q-grader and has been working with coffee for 14 years, starting as a barista, then quality manager for a coffee exporter, when she also became part of The Coffee Sensorium Project. Today she has her own company offering courses and consultancy in sensory analysis and chemistry applied to cupping, roasting, and extraction, and she also works for an export company, Cocolo Coffee Export.
Veronica Belchior and I spoke about all matters of acidity, from titratable acidity to what acids are present in our coffee and how they can impact coffee aroma and flavor—not only in the form of sourness but integral sensory attributes. This incredibly interesting conversation will change the way you think about acidity in coffee, and I hope will help us all appreciate and deepen our knowledge when it comes to this little-understood term.
Veronica Belchior
Thanks, Veronica, for taking the time to talking to us about acidity in coffee. You teach a course on the subject, right? How did that come about?
Yes. I teach academic-focused courses on coffee chemistry. The acidity course came from the need to better understand how its perception (by coffee drinkers) happens and how some parameters can affect it. Water pH and temperature can change the perception of acidity as we taste coffee. Titratable acidity is a measure that is directly related to the perception of acidity and research shows that the higher the coffee TDS*, the higher its titratable acidity. There are ways to better explore the acidity that we perceive in coffee, besides just knowing how to tell apart a citric or malic acidity cup, so to speak.
*TDS = Total Dissolved Solubles (essentially coffee solubles that have dissolved and have made it into your cup of coffee)
Can you explain what is the difference between pH and titratable acidity?
pH is the quantitative measure of the acidity of aqueous or other liquid solutions. It measures the concentration of H+ ions in the solution, that is, the more H+ ions, the lower the pH. Acids have a behavior in water that is to release these H+ ions. However, the pH of the water influences, as there is another measure, the pKa, related to the strength of the acids. Weak acids have low pKa and have greater difficulty in donating H+ ions. For example, when the pKa of an acid is equal to the pH of the solution, 50% of that acid will donate H+ ions and the other 50% will remain as an intact molecule. When the pKa value of the acid is greater than the pH of the solution, the less H+ it will donate to the solution. And, pKa values lower than the pH of the solution result in more donation of H+ ions to the solution, decreasing the pH. Therefore, if the pH of the solution changes, the balance of molecules that will be whole or donating H+ also changes.
Ok, but what does it have to do with coffee?
[Belchior laughes] I am getting there. The entire molecule can contribute towards building aroma and flavors, and this of course changes a coffee’s sensory profile.
On the other hand, the titratable acidity measures the total concentration of acids present in the beverage, either as a whole molecule or by donating H+. This measure, by adding up all the acid molecules, is directly related to the acidity that we perceive. Therefore, the higher the titratable acidity, the greater the perception of acidity in coffee.
What have academic studies shown so far regarding acidity in coffee?
Many studies lay out the concentration of different acids in coffee according to the maturation, process and roasting phases. Others correlate titratable acidity with TDS and perceived acidity. We are well aware of the acids present in coffee, their origin and their behavior in water. We know the impact of pH, temperature and the interaction between molecules on the sensory profile. What remains inconclusive is how chlorogenic acids can have a positive impact, as it is known that their derivatives contribute with metallic, bitter, and astringent notes.
So, you are saying that phases like coffee ripening, post-harvesting methods, and roasting processes end up modulating the perceived acidity in our cup of coffee?
Yes, all these phases modulate the acidity in coffee. The maturation phase, for example, is essential for the production of carboxylic acids and degradation of chlorogenic acids. However, super ripe coffees will have less acidity than coffees from previous stages. The post-harvest phase is another source of carboxylic acid production. In that sense, fermentation is a phase that produces many of these acids, influencing the sensory profile. Roasting represents another phase of modulation of the acids present in coffee. High temperatures and prolonged roast times degrade carboxylic acids. Therefore, very dark or very slow roasting tend to produce coffees with less perceived acidity.
You mentioned carboxylic acids, what are the types of acids present in our coffee drink and what is their impact on flavor notes?
There are three “classes” of acids in coffee: carboxylic acids, chlorogenic acids, and phosphoric acid, which is inorganic while the others are organic. Among the carboxylic acids, about 38 different molecules are found in coffee. The most famous are citric, malic, acetic, lactic, pyruvic, among others. They are considered the main responsible for salivation in the perception of acidity. However, different acids have different sensory identities; and many of them are volatile, which makes them contribute to the perception of aromas and flavors as well. Acetic acid is very volatile and is associated with vinegary notes in coffee, pyruvic acid with burnt caramel notes. Most acids cause a lot of salivation without having a contributing aroma. According to Yeager et al. (2021) high concentrations of malic, citric, and lactic acids increase the perception of citrus and herbaceous notes in coffee, and coffee with low concentration of acids are perceived as nuttier.
As for chlorogenic acids, more than 40 different molecules are recognized in coffee. They are associated with the perception of bitterness, metallic notes, and astringency, especially because of their derivatives during roasting, which can be quinic acid, lactones, and phenylidanes. However, Yeager et al. (2021) discuss that some works show chlorogenic acids related to the greater perception of some aromas in coffee—but still inconclusively.
Phosphoric acid is the inorganic acid in coffee. Being inorganic, it is a strong acid and meaning more phosphoric acid in the beverage will further decrease the pH, influencing the balance of whole molecules or donating H+. This can impact the identity of the perception of acidity or even aromas and flavors.
Citric acid.
What about water? How can water alkalinity impact the perception of acidity?
Water alkalinity affects the perception of acidity. According to the SCA, the alkalinity of the water must be between 40 to 75ppm CaCO3. Much below this range, water pH can drop a lot and it becomes very acidic, causing equipment corrosion. In contrast, very high alkalinity values buffer acids. Buffering makes us not perceive the acidity as it would be. Therefore, more than pH, water alkalinity has a significant impact on the sensory profile.
Can you brew coffee at home in a way that controls its acidity?
Acids are the first compounds to be extracted—they are very soluble. To soften the acidity, you can extract more of the other compounds—doing so will increase the TDS but the final cup itself will likely have a better balance.
How does the market today perceive acidity?
This question is a little more challenging to answer. In Brazil, people are getting more familiar with fermented, higher acidic coffees. However, there is this niche of people who prefer sweeter, “safer” coffees to acidic ones. I think this topic relates directly to the work of Batali et al. (2020), in which they propose a coffee brewing control framework that is more comprehensive in relation to TDS, extraction yield and consumption preferences. I believe that with a detailed framework for each type of beverage/sensory notes, we will find an audience for all tastes, from intense acidity to tea notes to chocolatey, round coffees.
Thank you!
Juliana Ganan is a Brazilian coffee professional and journalist. Read more Juliana Ganan on Sprudge.
Fairly compensating coffee farmers is a constant topic of discussion within the coffee community. Coffee is a product with a history rooted in colonialism and even today much of the coffee industry extracts profits from producing countries, leaving farmers scrambling to cover their costs of production. One way farmers, importers, and roasters address this issue is through community supported agriculture (CSA).
There are many types of CSA, but in a basic sense it is a system where a group of customers pay in advance for some or all of a farm’s harvest. This creates a relationship between farmers and customers that collectivizes both the risks and rewards of agriculture.
CSA is not new in coffee, but it remains a small part of the market. Still, there are a number of companies that are pushing the envelope of CSA.
Elmer Fajardo Pacheco
Anticonquista Café, a family-owned farm and roastery with its United States base in Chicago, started off serving coffee from a bicycle at events and farmer’s markets. After noticing how many repeat customers they had and talking to other vendors they decided to try out a CSA style program.
“We were inspired by our fellow farmers at the markets with their CSA models for Midwest fruits & veggies, and with the reduced amount of waste from packaging materials,” explains Lauren Reese, one of Anticonquista’s co-owners. “As a family-farm owned coffee roaster, we felt a CSA model for our coffee subscription was a way to bring us (the growers) and the marketgoers together through education, mutual support and to share the risks and benefits of coffee production.”
At Anticonquista, customers enroll in advance for either a Spring/Summer or Fall/Winter subscription and then pick up their coffee monthly or bi-weekly. This model means that before the coffee is even harvested the company has customers signed up to buy it, and an almost guaranteed source of steady income throughout the subscription period.
Anticonquista’s system is similar to the style of CSA employed by many produce farms in the US. However, there are other companies that take the same ideas of community support and crop pre-financing and apply them slightly differently.
“Similar to a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture), a CFC subscription pre-finances a portion of our partnering coffee farmer’s crops in exchange for a portion of their coffee harvest,” explains Carol Tessitore, project manager for Community Funded Coffee. “Each quarter (every three months), we partner with a different coffee farmer, so subscribers have the opportunity to try coffee from several different growing countries and regions.”
Even within specialty coffee the market can be volatile, and natural disasters, political issues, or even something like the COVID-19 pandemic can cause large fluctuations in the price of green coffee. Paying for a harvest in advance has the potential to put coffee farmers and buyers on more equal footing, lessening the often exploitative nature of the relationship. When farmers are paid up front they are insulated from some of these price fluctuations, and the risk of a smaller or lower quality harvest is shared more evenly between coffee producers and buyers.
“Farmers receive advance working capital, gain financial security, earn better crop prices, and benefit from the direct marketing plan,” writes Reese.
The direct marketing aspect of CSA can be a chance to educate coffee drinkers on the process of coffee production. Since customers are invested in the success of a farmer’s crop there is a unique opportunity to educate them on coffee farming, processing, transport, and roasting. This education is often important because customers are used to readily available bags of coffee that they can simply pick off of a shelf.
“At a time when one can receive goods with next day shipping, it was a little tricky to get people to adjust to the timeline of coffee seasonality let alone shipping delays,” notes Tessitore. “We believe an ancillary benefit of the project is learning about global food system dynamics and food systems challenges like adverse weather events and global patterns that affect equity within the food system and global food security.”
Teaching coffee drinkers about where their coffee is coming from and creating relationships can also help create a loyal customer base.
“We’ve seen higher customer retention, but also new customers,” says Reese. “Our membership has increased 50% since we began our CSC program in early 2021. The increase in membership has increased our CSC revenue by 274%.”
Educating customers is an exciting opportunity, but it can take a large amount of time and energy on the part of coffee roasters. This is less of a problem for vertically integrated businesses like Anticonquista where the ownership team, spread between Guatemala and Chicago, can easily share information and have experience with coffee farming that helps them answer customer questions. However, for a business based in the United States like Junior’s, this education and communication can be much more time consuming, leading to higher costs.
The first year of CFC at Junior’s was made possible by an Oatly Big Idea Grant, but going forward with the program would require a much larger number of customers to cover the salary of a project manager whose main role consists of communication and education.
Still, the future of CSA in coffee is hopeful. There are small coffee CSA projects across the United States and the SCA award-winning and farmer-owned cooperative Pachamama Coffee, which was founded in 2006, still operates its CSA subscription that started in 2011. There is also the opportunity for increased CSA partnerships between roasters and farmers. Drawing on their experience, Junior’s put together a guide for other roasters looking to venture into Community Funded Coffee.
“Community Funded Coffee is an open-source project. The culmination of the project is a “how-to” guide for other roasters to create their own programs. The name and branding is available for anyone to use,” writes Tessitore. “We’d love to see Coffee CSA’s happen all over the world!”
Elmer Fajardo Pacheco, co-owner of Anticonquista, also sees a future for CSA in coffee, especially for first and second generation immigrants to the US. He is eager to continue Anticonquista’s work and move towards a better future for coffee farmers.
“While we’re a very young company, we have a bigger vision of what we can achieve with our CSC program and the level of direct support our members can have with the farm,” he explains. “We must think in creative ways in how a CSA can promote dignity, improve overall health of both farms and producers and increase investments in agroecological production, infrastructure, and equipment.”
It would be too simple to say that religious people drink coffee because it’s not alcohol. When coffee was first commodified, all three Abrahamic religions had to contend with how this new beverage fit into each faith’s ideal way of life. Each religion had their opponents and proponents but most eventually accepted the beverage. However, acceptance wasn’t achieved without a fight (and some cheekiness).
Early legends of the discovery of coffee are familiar to us: 9th century Kaldi and his goats, who showed him the way by dancing after eating coffee cherries. The legend sometimes goes on that Kaldi took the miraculous berries to a local monastery to show to a monk, who was amazed when the berries helped him stay awake for midnight prayers. Unfortunately, repeated Islamic jihads in Ethiopia destroyed most of the churches and monasteries in the 16th century, so any record of whether monks continued consuming coffee and how have been lost.
However, some of the Oromo people of Ethiopia still practice Waaqeffanna, their indigenous religion that survived Christian and Islamic attempts at conversion. Waaqeffanna is a primarily oral tradition, so it often gets excluded from historical records, but the religion probably predates all the Abrahamic religions, and it includes a story about coffee. In Oromo tradition, their creator god Waaqa approached the corpse of a man who had refused to do his will. Waaga shed tears over the man’s body, and where his tears hit the ground, the first coffee trees sprouted. Today, roasting and drinking coffee is still central to Oromo religious ceremonies.
Our earliest written history of someone consuming coffee as a beverage come from tales of Sufi mystics in 1414. Sufi Muslims are a sect of mystics focused on the purification of the inner self. After working their day jobs, Sufis would join together for evening prayers, and often enjoy coffee poured out of clay pot beforehand, to perk up their energy. According to Tim Schenk, author of Holy Grounds, this developed into a devotional ritual which “involved coffee-drinking accompanied by recitation of aratib, the invocation 116 times of the divine name Ya Qaqi.”
The drink spread beyond the Sufi devout. Briefly there was some resistance—conservative Muslims believed that coffee should be viewed as an intoxicating substance and therefore banned, as alcohol was. The authorities latched onto the intoxication as inspiring sedition in the Ottoman realm. This link inspired leaders like Sultan Murad IV to crack down on coffee consumption with deadly force.
In response, legends that legitimized coffee for Muslims began to crop up, including that the angel Gabriel had given coffee to devout Muslims to cure disease, help them pray, or even to Muhammad himself when the prophet had a stomachache. Eventually, the drink was accepted and, according to Farshid Emami, coffeehouses were “ubiquitous in Ottoman lands” by the early 17th century. From there, they spread through the Arab world and along the Mediterranean.
Much like the Muslims before them, rabbis and Jews discovered the beneficial addition of coffee to late-night rituals. The Tikkun Chatzot is a midnight rite that, according to the Talmud, honors a dark night when God mourned the destruction of a temple. Even devout Jews hated the midnight start time though, and lobbied to have it start earlier until coffee was introduced the Palestine in the late 16th century. Once Palestinian Jews could drink coffee to stay awake through the vigil, it took off in popularity.
Questions of acceptability arose within the Jewish community as well, and continue to be negotiated. The initial debate centered around whether preparing coffee counts as cooking, and whether Jews could therefore drink coffee made by a non-Jew. As Schenck relates, this was settled by deeming coffee simply flavored water, which allowed it to become a legal exemption in Halachic law.
However, as milk, syrups, and decaffeination have joined the world of coffee, each has had to be negotiated. Today, syrups have to be taken on a case-by-case basis, with each determined as kosher depending on the process for the individual flavor. Tools like kosherstarbucks.com have cropped up over the years to help Jews keep kosher while enjoying coffee. As for decaffeination, the Swiss Water Process is the only decaffeination method permissible under Halachic law.
It was the Jewish community of Livorno, a port city in Italy, who first imported coffee to Italy and opened the first Italian coffeehouse in 1632. In fact, the Jewish community of Europe played an instrumental role for the first 100 years of the coffee trade. Unfortunately, they were banned from the trade around 1780 by anti-Semitic Europeans who had noticed that coffee could be lucrative and wanted it for themselves. Nevertheless, it was a man remembered only as Jacob the Jew who opened the first coffeehouse in Oxford, England in 1650.
The spread of coffee into Europe was met with ire by Christians. Early Christian opposition to coffee was largely due to its link with Islam. First introduced to Europeans during the religious wars we know as the Crusades, coffee finally started to gain popularity in Europe during the late 16th century. But when it was finally imported into Italy, the 16th-century capital of Christianity, from the “land of the Mohammadens” by Jewish traders, the drink was viewed as suspect. So deeply linked were Islam and coffee that Europeans referred to the drink as the “Devil’s drink” and the “wine of Araby” until it was accepted in Christian culture.
It was allegedly Pope Clement VIII who weighed in around 1605. Priests pressed him to ban it outright, denouncing it as “an invention of Satan,” as William Ukers wrote in All About Coffee. While Christianity has lots of rules about what adherents can and can’t do, there are few food restrictions in the faith, with the notable exception of meat on Fridays during Lent. For the Pope to ban an entire beverage would have been unprecedented. But priests insisted, claiming that allowing Christians to drink coffee “was to risk falling into a trap set by Satan for their souls,” Ukers relates.
Pope Clement, wanting to make an informed decision, asked for coffee to be brought to him first. He found the smell so appetizing that he tried a sip. According to Ukers, his amazed response was, “Why, this Satan’s drink is so delicious that it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it. We shall fool Satan by baptizing it, and making it a truly Christian beverage.” Clement VIII’s famous quote is probably cheekier than his real response, but whatever his official declaration, coffee spread like wildfire throughout Catholic Europe once the Vatican had given its blessing. Today there’s even a joke among Protestant leaders that once Catholics started to drink coffee and sober up, they became Protestants.
Puritans were one of the few religious groups to embrace coffee quickly. In England, Puritans had long protested the widespread consumption of beer, which they saw as leading drinkers into sin. (In cities, beer had long been replied upon as a source of hydration–potable water was hard to come by.) So the rise of coffeehouses as a center of civic engagement and community was seen as a big win for the anti-alcohol lobby. Coffee’s known stimulating properties also fit in well with the espoused Protestant work ethic, leading to a wholehearted acceptance of the beverage.
This embrace of coffee and coffee culture by Christians has only intensified. Across the United States, churches open coffee shops like Westside Vineyard’s Coffee Connection in Los Angeles with the stated goal of evangelizing to non-Christians in subtle ways. In the US South, it is not uncommon to stumble across a Bible study in any given cafe, and searching “Jesus and coffee” on Instagram yields millions of aesthetic photos of Bibles with coffee mugs.
On the other hand, Mormons today abstain from coffee. According to LDS history, God revealed to Joseph Smith in Doctrines and Covenants 89 that “hot drinks”—loosely understood as coffee and tea—”are not for the body or belly.” Caffeine itself is not banned, so soda is acceptable for Mormons, but the LDS church recently issued a statement saying iced coffee is not. Apparently, Mormon youth were increasingly drinking iced coffee to get around the ban on hot drinks.
Coffee has come a long way from its early reputation as intoxicating, dangerous, and Satanic.
Perhaps because coffee is not seen as a drug, nor as “intoxicating” in ways that concern most people, it’s become the acceptable social beverage of most religious communities. Through the blessings of religious leaders, coffee became an acceptable way for people to connect outside places of worship. Once rejected by the conservatives of almost every religion, today coffee is arguably a religion unto itself, with its own unique rituals, worshippers, and devotion. For the non-religious, coffee’s ability to bring together community can fill the communal role that worship once played.
In June of 1922, William Harrison Ukers was gathering his thoughts.
He was ready to return final proofs of his first book, All About Coffee, to the printer and the time had come to write his preface. As might befit a volume that had taken 17 years to research and write—the first serious American book on coffee to be published in 30 years, its author noted—Ukers used most of the preface to acknowledge more than 100 institutions and individuals for their assistance. This thorough thank-you list foreshadowed what would follow, 800 detailed and at times pedantic pages that amounted to more than just a serious book about coffee. Far from being an exuberant boast, the title was a simple statement of fact. All About Coffee was… all about coffee, an exhaustive if not always wholly accurate encyclopedia on the topic, more comprehensive than anything previously written.
Published in October of 1922, the tome that celebrates its 100th birthday this year was arguably the most important single book about coffee of the 20th century. Long after some of the science, details about countries, and social customs found between its covers had become dated, much of the content remained relevant. All About Coffee was reprinted more than a dozen times after the publication of a second edition in 1935, and then underwent 20 years of revival printings by the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) starting in 1993. If you own a copy of All About Coffee, chances are it is one of these SCAA reprints. In 2009, The Gutenberg Project scanned the 1922 edition and made it available online for free. Several copies of the 1935 edition are available online from the Internet Archive at archive.org.
“Even after a century, William H. Ukers’s masterpiece remains a singular and indispensable guide to the world of coffee. Few books on any subject can make the same claim. Its endurance across dramatic changes in the coffee industry itself is a testament to its author’s astonishing mastery of his subject, earned through decades of research and writing on the story of coffee. The amount of work that went into the book is all but impossible to imagine — yet it paid off. Ukers wrote a classic that is unlikely to be matched in the next hundred years, either.”
Publication of All About Coffee was a milestone moment for the editor of Tea and Coffee Trade Journal, who everyone in the office, including his wife, called Mr. Ukers. He was marking 20 years as a coffee writer and editor. In recognition of his contributions not only to coffee but the grocery trade in general as a writer and spokesperson, Central High School in Philadelphia, where Ukers had received his Bachelor of Arts degree—to this day, the only high school in America with the authority to issue a BA degree—bestowed upon him an honorary Master of Arts. And yet, in 1922, at age 49, Ukers had not even reached the midpoint of his coffee and tea writing career.
An ambitious young man, Ukers began professional life as a seemingly frenetic journalist in 1893. He wrote for five newspapers over four years in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and finally in New York City, which remained his home until his death in 1954. In 1897 he found his field if not quite his position when he started writing for trade magazines like The Paper Trade Journal and House Furnishing Review, where he won his first job as editor. When he was made editor of The Spice Mill magazine in 1902, he’d found his niche. Coffee and tea.
The Spice Mill was founded in 1878 by coffee equipment inventor Jabez Burns whose company would become the “Burns” in Probat-Burns 100 years later. Ukers would later write that The Spice Mill was “the first publication in America devoted to the coffee and spice trade.” At the same time, the magazine was devoted to promoting the business of Jabez Burns & Sons. These types of publications were known as “house organs” and were distributed primarily to employees and customers. It’s been said that Ukers did not care for the idea that The Spice Mill was not a truly independent trade journal. In All About Coffee Ukers writes plainly about his time at The Spice Mill: “William H. Ukers was made editor in 1902, and he continued until 1904, when he left to assume editorial direction of The Tea and Coffee Trade Journal.”
This somewhat cryptic phrasing, “assume editorial direction,” has a companion in Ukers’ coffee chronology at the end of the book, where he indicates a bit of magic may have occurred in 1901 when “The first issue of The Tea and Coffee Trade Journal, devoted to the interests of the tea and coffee trades, appears in New York.” Sources that one would presume authoritative often state that Ukers founded the magazine in 1901. In some instances, it is said he tried to convince the Burns family to make The Spice Mill a true trade journal and when they refused, he went out and started Tea and Coffee Trade Journal. This particular version cannot be reconciled with Ukers own dates; however, it’s possible, maybe even likely given the somewhat vague language he uses to describe these events, that he worked as editor of The Spice Mill at the same time he was working through the start-up years of Tea and Coffee Trade Journal.
Unlike The Spice Mill, which was produced out of the Jabez Burns & Sons building on the Upper West Side, Tea and Coffee Trade Journal had offices on Wall Street, deep in the heart of the American coffee trade, just a block from Lower Wall Street where “coffee importers, coffee roasters, coffee dealers, and coffee brokers conduct their ‘street’ sales.” This detail frames one of the endless golden nuggets scattered throughout All About Coffee, in this instance a historically contextual explanation of the difference between sales of futures and sales of spot coffee, which is bought and sold “on the spot.” Even for those who have little room for the traditions, manners, and customs that have been handed down over the years inside the coffee industry, there is value in understanding what lies beneath the structures, standards, and practices that we’ve inherited, even when we decide to set them aside.
Ukers’ claim that All About Coffee took 17 years to research and write is not inaccurate, it’s just a little incomplete. Those 17 years correspond to his years of writing and editing Tea and Coffee Trade Journal, which he dubbed “The Recognized Organ of the Tea, Coffee, Spice, and Fine Grocery Trade.” A good portion of the content found in his book was recycled from the magazine during what might be considered especially interesting times for the coffee industry.
During the 17 years Ukers worked on his book, over 4,000 coffee related patents were granted in the U.S. alone, including the “Burns tilting sample-roaster,” whose design remains ubiquitous in cupping labs today. Regular and significant advances were made in the science of decaffeination and the manufacture of soluble coffees. Overproduction in Brazil went from an occasional event to a chronic condition, causing Brazil to attempt various strategies for keeping coffee off the market and prices from dropping, and putting the U.S. government on a trade-war footing.
Among the greatest challenges to the American coffee industry during these years was the combination of the Pure Food and Drug Act passed in 1906 and ongoing, relentless attacks on coffee from manufacturers of coffee substitutes, the primary culprit being C.W. Post (yes, as in breakfast cereal).
Post manufactured a coffee substitute called “Postum.” Exploiting some of the consumer fear that helped lead to passage of the Pure Food and Drug act, and somewhat ironically given the truth in labelling aspects of the new law, Post just simply lied about coffee. This is from a Postum advertisement:
“The woman who cares is watchful of every influence that bears upon her husband’s health. And her part lies largely in selecting proper food and drink. For example, when science says that coffee contains a drug whose constant use makes for premature old age, and whose reactionary effects cripple nerves and heart, she shelves the coffee and serves the delicious, pure-food drink POSTUM.”
Science, by the way, didn’t say any such thing. Post also claimed that his Grape Nuts cereal could cure appendicitis, but in 1913 when he was dying of appendicitis, he didn’t request a bowl of Grape Nuts.
It was this type of threat that helped unite roasters in 1911 to form the National Coffee Roasters Traffic and Pure Food Association, which would soon change its name to the National Coffee Roasters Association and, eventually, National Coffee Association. Ukers devoted himself in both his magazine and All About Coffee to answering attacks on coffee as unwholesome. The wounds remained fresh enough in 1922 that he wrote in his forward:
“Trading upon the credulity of the hypochondriac and the caffein-sensitive, in recent years there has appeared in America and abroad a curious collection of so-called coffee substitutes. Most of them have been shown by official government analyses to be sadly deficient in food value—their only alleged virtue.”
Although coffee was going through both challenging and innovative times as Ukers took on the editor’s mantle full-time at Tea and Coffee Trade Journal, it was coffee through the ages that clearly fascinated him as much if not more than any news of the day. The acknowledgements for All About Coffee indicate that much of the copious research that went into the book was devoted to the past. Half of the chapters and 40% of the writing in the 1922 first edition of the book address aspects of coffee history, from ancient times to recent memory. The book devotes many pages to stories about the trials and tribulations that coffee has endured through the ages. Given the context of his first two decades as editor, which included the World War I, Ukers seemed to learn and want to pass along what is perhaps one of the most important lessons for anyone who attaches their prospects to the “festive cup.”
Coffee survives. It could be argued that these histories, combined with the book’s comprehensive bibliography, constitute its most enduring value if not its most significant contribution to coffee.
“William Ukers was the ultimate tea and coffee man of his times, and his comprehensive history of coffee laid the groundwork for all future histories of the unique bean. He may not have gotten everything completely right, but his breadth of knowledge is a vital basis for all that followed.”
Groundwork that is more apparent from a distance than in context is that Ukers helped usher in the recognition of greater variety and specificity when describing the taste of coffee.
Two hundred years before All About Coffee, Humphret Broadbent wrote in Domestick Coffee-Man (1722) that underboiled coffee tastes “flat or sour,” and that spring water makes coffee “hard and distasteful” while river water makes it “smooth and pleasant.” 70 years later in A Treatise Concerning the Properties and Effects of Coffee (1792), Benjamin Moseley described coffee under various conditions as tasting bitterish, tasteless, insipid, coarse, rank, excellent, superior, disagreeable, exhilarating, delicate, and grateful. By 1872 when Robert Hewitt published Coffee: Its History Cultivation and Uses we see a pattern emerging. Negative taste attributes were gaining specificity while positive attributes remained vague: bitter, muddy, harsh, and astringent versus mild, delicate, and delightful.
Hewitt’s book is one of the “serious” coffee books acknowledged in Ukers preface, as is Coffee From Plantation to Cup(1881) by Francis Thurber, which expanded significantly on the coffee tasting vocabulary, using at least 17 words, including several words new to the literature at the time that can be found on the SCA/WCR flavor wheel today, like stale, woody, musty, and acrid.
While positive descriptions remained vague, a tasting vocabulary was emerging around which there was some sort of intrinsic consensus. Forty years after Thurber published his book, almost all of his taste descriptors appeared in All About Coffee, the single exception being the word “acrid.” Ukers doubled Thurber’s lexicon, using twice as many words to talk about coffee’s flavors. With some subtle variations in usage, all of the terms can be found in Ukers’ 1935 edition as well, “rubbery” being the only obvious addition. Oddly, rubbery is not used in a real world context. It can only be found in the Coffee Dictionary, itself new to the 1935 edition and accounting for eight of the 15 new pages of content prior to the index. The other seven new pages can be found, understandably, in the science sections.
The descriptions of taste found in All About Coffee sound incomplete to the specialty coffee ear because the purpose of “cup testing” at the time was to identify faults, not explore a highly differentiated product with flavor characteristics that need to be described on a bag and on a website in a crowded market. Even so, one need not spend long on the coffee aisle in any grocery store to find antique coffee taste descriptors like rich and mild and of course, smooth, which is at least 300 years old as a coffee tasting note.
Ukers followed up All About Coffee with over a dozen books on coffee and tea, including several travel books called the Little Journey Series. He even wrote a novel set around the time of the Boston Tea Party titled Rosemary and Briar Sweet: An Eighteenth Century Romance of John Company and Young America. According to James Quinn, who succeeded Ukers as editor and eventually publisher of Tea and Coffee Trade Journal, all of Ukers’ books were successful except for the novel. In 1935, the same year he updated All About Coffee, Ukers published another monumental work, All About Tea, a two volume set held in the same regard by tea professional over the years as his coffee opus is by coffee professionals.
“Ukers is such a giant in the field of coffee it’s difficult to know where to start. The irony being that Ukers is pretty much where I always start if I am trying to research a new topic. If there is a title of ‘the last person to know everything about coffee’ it surely belongs to him. I can’t imagine anyone having the courage, let alone the knowledge, to write a similar tome today. The great thing about the book is that he gives such a comprehensive portrait of all aspects of the trade, particularly the commercial aspects, where he is strongest on the passage from green coffee purchasing to retail – the elements that are most obscured in other accounts.
That doesn’t mean that he gets everything right, of course. One searches the book in vain for any discussion of ethical issues or worries about sustainability in his descriptions of production at origin where labour is simply described as another input without any deeper concern for the lives of those involved (interestingly Francis Thurber’s Coffee from Plantation to Cup published back in 1881 displays more sensitivity to such issues).”
Beyond the value of All About Coffee as a history textbook, we should not assume all of the technical information is no longer relevant. Several sections of the book that discuss roasting and brewing would fit nicely into any discourse on specialty coffee today. Indeed, once upon a time, a sentence from Ukers’ forward served as a ready definition of specialty coffee for many specialty coffee professionals. Though we have as an industry segment set aside the simplicity of his words long ago for all the complexity we encounter in trying to truly differentiate our product, his words ring true in that they reflect what most of us find satisfying most of the time: “Good coffee, carefully roasted and properly brewed.”
Endnotes
Notes on the year Ukers died: The Library of Congress lists William Ukers death as 1946 and this is the most common citation. In a 2001 interview James Quinn, the second editor of T&CTJ states that Ukers died in 1956. However, according to an obituary that appeared in the New York Times, he died on January 19, 1954.
Notes on Ukers’ world view: It should be noted for those approaching All About Coffee for the first time that, like much if not all writing that tallies its age by decades, the world view is at times jarring and sad, though hardly surprising. Ukers not only fails to rise above the retrospectively disappointing social mores of his era, he seems to rush too readily into racist colonial hot-takes on indigenous populations for someone otherwise given to thoroughness and considered opinion in the context of business musings. While it’s tempting to intellectualize century old perspectives, they cannot be excused when more enlightened contemporaries where not exactly hiding their lamp under a bushel.
Writer’s note: I would like to thank the authors and prominent coffee historians Mark Pendergrast, Professor Augustine Sedgewick, and Professor Jonathan Morris for generously contributing their thoughts on William H. Ukers and All About Coffee to this article. For we happy few who delight inordinately in coffee history their books, cited above, are both sustenance and feast.
January Coffee sits on the prow of a strip mall in Boulder, Colorado. Next door is a hair salon, a Michael’s, a Petsmart, a Walgreens; the Flatirons reflect off its window glass the same way they do for so many storefronts in the city of 108,000. But inside is something kind of weird. Or someone; really, it’s two someones: Kristi Persinger and John Imig.
For Persinger and Imig, January the month is as important as January the cafe. They met in January (2017), started dating in January (2018), moved to Colorado together in January (2020), and formed what would be the idea for January (the cafe) in January (2021).
Kristi Persinger and John Imig
In Boulder, small businesses live and die on their ability to cater to students and outdoor recreators. Besides the outsized student population, which swells in the autumn and spring, there are twice as many sporting goods and gyms here per capita than in anyplace else in the country. 18–35-year-olds stalk the medians of parking lots in plush running sneakers, darting between the doors of fitness studios and immaculate 4×4 SUVs, which crawl up every thoroughfare into the mountains.
January’s success here is predicated on neither of these things. Instead, the cafe is built on Persinger and Imig’s decades of experience working for specialty shops up and down the west coast, from Intelligentsia to Stumptown Coffee Roasters and many in-between.
“Working as a woman of color in coffee, I haven’t always necessarily felt that my work environments have been that way,” Persinger says. “So we have an internal goal to make this shop the best place that people have ever worked. We can try to make it a little bit better for ourselves, you know?”
“We wanted to create an environment that’s inclusive and equitable,” Persinger says. “Where everybody’s ideas are heard and there’s an openness to share.” Which, in January’s case, results in a graceful work environment where pressure is diffuse and everyone, regardless of background, is given the support they need and is paid and recognized for their role in making the cafe work, and a cafe where every customer is served the same great coffee without pretense.
“Working as a woman of color in coffee, I haven’t always necessarily felt that my work environments have been that way,” Persinger says. “So we have an internal goal to make this shop the best place that people have ever worked. We can try to make it a little bit better for ourselves, you know?”
Part of the way they do that is by encouraging a culture of openness and honesty.
“I don’t want people to feel embarrassed about sharing that they’re having a particularly bad day,” Persinger says. “I want to be understanding of that, because we’re all human, and the thing that we try to do is just lead with empathy in all that we do, and that makes just such a big difference in how everybody interacts here. And then our staff are all stoked to be here and really proud of where they work.”
Imig adds: “We’re open about our mental health with our staff and, and when they’re open with us about theirs, we can be supportive.”
Another part is by paying January employees a living wage. “Because we’re a new shop,” Persinger says, “we didn’t have a fully fleshed out budget in the beginning, but we knew that we wanted to pay everybody more than the current minimum wage.” In Colorado, that number is $9.54 for tipped employees as of this writing. “And we just kind of landed on a number that we thought we could afford to start, which right now is $13.”
“We started everybody at the same exact wage,” Imig says. Regardless of experience, their philosophy is that everyone at a shop “pulls their weight equally. Every job in the cafe is important and just as hard as another.” Just because one person’s a trained barista doesn’t mean that their colleague on register is doing any less. It also means tips are pooled and distributed evenly across employees.
And thought they haven’t fully figured out what their wage structure will look like in the future, beyond their current team of 11, which is up from just the two of them on opening day back in May of 2022. Eventually, if January continues to grow and expand to new shops, Persinger says they “want to think about how we can provide equity to people who are in it for the long haul.” The reasoning is that if employees of businesses are expected to take ownership over the success of their shop, they ought to have actual ownership over some part of it too.
As a very young, independently-owned and funded cafe, January’s able to offer living wages in large part because of how hard Persinger and Imig both work. After funding the cafe on their own, not taking salaries during January’s first three months, and each holding down a second job, they now work a comfortable, combined 160-hour work week. Today they pay themselves barista wages and walk around with bags under their eyes and dad hats to shield them from the high-elevation sun.
“We were trying to give as much to the shop as we possibly could,” Persinger says of the first few months. “In order to allow it to function and make enough money to be able to pay our staff well enough and, you know, afford to operate.”
In addition to being a great place to work, January is a great cafe. Because for however good Persinger and Imig try to be as owners, they are also absolute dorks when it comes to coffee. Just huge honkin’ coffee nerds.
January’s a multi-roaster that brings in coffee from across the country—they always carry Onyx, and have featured roasters like San Francisco’s Ritual, Dune out of Santa Barbara, and Mother Tongue from Oakland. They operate in the Australian model, offering a full-service menu of homemade food that’s all great—they make almost everything in-house, from breakfast burritos to the vanilla that goes into their drinks.
“We love great coffee, we love amazing food,” Persinger says. “And we wanted to be able to have both of those things in our shop. Because I feel like it’s just a more holistic experience when you can have an awesome breakfast burrito, that’s like the best you’ve maybe ever had, and great coffee.”
Then, she gets a bit conspiratorial, lowering her voice. “The craziest part is that we are a headless ventless kitchen,” she says. “So we can’t cook anything on a stove.”
Imig seems to nod. “We have to do everything in ovens.”
“So that was the thing that makes this so difficult,” Kristi says. “It’s sort of literal insanity.”
And while it’s true that making a full food program work with only an oven and a panini press is a kind of insanity, it can’t really be said that that’s the thing that makes January so difficult. Sure, having to scramble eggs in an oven is inconvenient and hard, but from an outside perspective, what makes the project of January so difficult is everything. What Persinger and Imig are trying to do, and what they do by necessity, is just difficult. All of it. From opening their doors with two weeks of operating expenses in the bank to working a double before taking off to their second jobs—it’s all difficult.
“There are days when we want to give it all up,” Persinger says. “Because I’m so tired, and I can’t do this anymore. And then some days where I’m so incredibly grateful for what we’ve created and seeing our literal dream come to fruition. It doesn’t get any better.”
Shylee Mosali has much to be proud of. As the first female coffee roaster in Iran, and one of the country’s most reputable coffee experts, she has faced considerable discrimination and injustice—and her main weapon to fight back is with knowledge, expertise, and a focus on quality. Today Mosali is proud that she can have conversations about specialty coffee with her grandfather, and that nowadays, her mother drinks high quality brewed coffee instead of the cheap stuff.
The journey to this reality was no easy road.
Shylee Mosali was born in Qazvin, a town near the capital city of Iran. A nerdy kid who overcame her shyness only to protect her younger brother from bullies, she lost her father at age 13. With this tragedy came great change, and she and her two siblings were raised by a single mother who worked and went to school at the same time.
Mosali took on her mother’s independence and determination. She grew up hearing the story of how her mother, armed with her first paycheck, bought her grandmother a piece of jewelry to mark her independence. But with a sense of tradition and obligation, Mosali followed a path towards becoming a doctor.
After two failed attempts at the medical school entrance exam, Mosali settled for a Clinical Laboratory Science major and a dream of an independent life in a large city. Armed with an education, and against the will of her conservative family, Mosali moved to Tehran at the age of 21. “I did it but I had no faith in myself and I was sad and depressed,” Mosali tells me, “but if I had told even a little bit about this to my mother, she would have forced me to cancel my plans and move back to my hometown.”
New to city life, Mosali slowly began to exercise the independent streak she learned as a child. She met a new group of creative friends, started dating, and began hanging out at a local cafe. Her time spent socializing in a cafe would soon prove to be more formative than any of her school classes.
With no previous experience and no expectations, she applied for a job at Sam Coffee Roasters and got it. Historically, her family would have found it shameful for an educated and financially stable woman to work as a restaurant or cafe employee—so Mosali hid this part of her life from her family.
Her first training at work was about coffee—what else?—and Mosali stunned the room by earning the top score among 50 coworkers, including the baristas. “Only two months passed and I already had a great feeling of being seen and appreciated at work,” Mosali remembers, “which definitely helped to be able to ignore the negative thoughts about me working in a cafe.”
Because of her educational background, the chemistry part of coffee science and botany caught her attention mostly and triggered her enthusiasm about the world of coffee. Cafe work was tough and her circumstances felt a bit strange, but Mosali excelled at her new secret cafe life. She did a lot of research, read many books, practiced a lot during training, and continued to rise through the ranks at work. After a few months, she was promoted to a prominent barista position at Sam Coffee Roasters in Tehran.
With this achievement in place, it was time to end the secrets, and to proudly invite her mother to the cafe to share her new home.
The visit was joyful. To celebrate, Shylee Mosali bought a piece of jewelry for her mother, just as her mother did for her grandmother when she went to work almost 30 years earlier.
Years passed, and Shylee continued to excel at Sam Coffee Roasters. After 36 months of prominent barista work, the company chose Mosali to train to become its next coffee roaster. This was a major moment for Mosali, and also represented an historic accomplishment in Iran’s male-dominated coffee community.
The truth is, Shylee Mosali is the first woman in all of Iran to work professionally as a coffee roaster, and for a nationally recognized, prominent company like Sam Coffee Roasters, the impact cannot be overstated. “I felt all that effort and hard work finally paid back,” she says. “It was a dream come true for sure!”
As Iran’s first female-identified roaster, Mosali sees herself as a node for future change in the country’s growing coffee industry. Mosali believes all human beings are equal and capable; this sentiment draws no line or distinction between men and women. She instead prefers to be evaluated for the quality of her work and expertise rather than her position as a woman. She also rejects the novelty that comes with roasting in Iran and instead sees coffee as an international phenomenon with no border.
“I strongly believe having sexist views in my profession or even limiting myself to a specific geographical location does nothing good for anyone. This can’t stop me from pursuing my dreams.”
Her curious and rebellious character is what led her to break social norms and taboos around cafe culture and coffee consumption, but for her, it doesn’t stop at Sam Coffee Roasters. With dreams of working for a big multinational coffee roastery chain and eventually starting her own small boutique roastery—perhaps far from Tehran—she strives to motivate and educate the next generation of Shylees in Iran. Until then, she’ll stay deep in the science of coffee, pushing boundaries, obsessing over flavors, and savoring her own quality time with the fruits of possibility.
Shahriar Azimi is a coffee professional and freelance journalist based in Tehran. This is Shahriar Azimi’s first feature for Spudge.
