History UsefulNotes / Coffee

* Pressure-brewed coffee: Better known as espresso, this is similar to filtered coffee except instead of using gravity, it uses steam pressure or some kind of pump to force hot water through fine grounds. (Single-serve coffee makers like Keurig and Senseo work on a similar principle, though at much lower pressure.) Espresso makers range from the simple Moka pot (similar to a percolator, but the coffee collects in a top reservoir and doesn't reboil) up to massive pump-powered monsters that can cost as much as a car and produce dozens or hundreds of shots of espresso in an hour. Espresso is originally from Italy, but has become the base of most of modern Western coffeehouse culture, [[GermansLoveDavidHasselhoff from Scandinavia to Japan and on]]. The café cubano of Cuba and south Florida is espresso carefully stirred together with more sugar than you'd expect it to be able to dissolve and is a nice but hard-to-find alternative to straight espresso. Worth noting, Espresso is sometimes incorrectly called "Expresso" by English-speakers, which is doubly amusing if you know that "Espresso" comes from the Italian word for "Expressed", as the water is ''expressed'', or forced through the grounds.

*** Breakfast Blend: Common in North America, usually a lighter coffee that won't compete with heavy breakfast foods or startle a sleepy palate. In the United States, similar coffees are sometimes referred to as "donut shop" or "diner" blends, implying that they're meant to be just like the morning coffee you grab on the way to work, but better.

* Filtered coffee: The hot water is poured through the coffee grounds and the brewed coffee passes through a filter (usually a paper or metal mesh cone) into a carafe. The usual way of doing this is with a funnel with a filter in it, with the water coming from either a kettle or a dedicated coffee machine. Automatic drip filters, by far the most widely used, scale particularly well, and range in size from small home units of 3-12 cup capacity to massive urns found in diners and office break rooms, some of which seem large enough for a child (or a [[Literature/{{Illuminatus}} midget]]) to hide in.

* Cold-brewed: Similar to sun tea and the like, it's somewhat common to make coffee simply by infusing the grounds into cold or room-temperature water and then filter the result. There are people who swear by this for iced coffee, claiming it gets a more balanced, less bitter/acid flavor. It's somewhat common among cold brew fans to treat this as the seriousest of SeriousBusiness.

Coffee's made in a number of ways, but they all start with dried, roasted coffee beans. Drying the coffee beans entails sloughing off the fruit coating and washing and drying the seeds. The coffee is then roasted, which gets rid of the grassy flavor of green coffee and produces the flavor compounds we normally associate with it. There are several different levels of roast; although the names aren't standardized, one way of ranking the roasts from lightest to darkest in the US would be as follows: cinnamon, city roast, full city roast (think Starbucks), Italian roast, French roast.[[note]]There is also Vienna roast, but absolutely no one agrees on what this is; you'll see it as a light roast and a dark roast.[[/note]] Like everything else about coffee, roast is SeriousBusiness; light roast fans will ridicule dark roast fans as drinking burnt coffee, while dark roast aficionados complain about acidity and underdeveloped flavor in light roasts. (Ironically, the company most responsible for creating demand for high-end coffee in the United States, Peet's, uses a darker roast than almost anyone else, including Starbucks.) Perhaps counterintuitively, the darkness of the roast and the strength of the brew have little to do with each other; the same bean, roasted dark, will actually have less caffeine in it than a light roast.

Those basic methods of preparation are the base of a huge array of different drinks. When not drunk black, coffee's most common accompaniments are milk and sugar, and everyone likes it a little different; Middle Eastern coffee is sweet (except during Ramadan) and dark, espresso is syrupy with a cocoa-like bitterness and a fine foam (called crema) on top, and drip coffee is thin and sometimes faintly translucent.

* Direct infusion: This is used with Turkish, er, [[InsistentTerminology Greek]], um, [[OverlyLongGag Armenian]], screw it, let's just call it [[RuleOfCautiousEditingJudgement Near Eastern Coffee]], as well as what's commonly known as cowboy coffee. This coffee is brewed in a pot directly over the heat; Middle Eastern Coffee is ground to a powder, often with spices (cardamom is a favorite and practically universal in Arab countries, although cinnamon and a few others also show up) and prepared quickly and usually sweetened (drink this coffee without any sugar and people look at you funny), while cowboy coffee uses a coarse grind (presumably to avoid overextracting the flavors and burning the coffee while it sits by the fire). The Near Eastern variant is almost certainly the original way to make coffee, as it doesn't rely on specialized equipment and is traditional in the earliest countries to get coffee.

The legend has it that coffee was discovered in Ethiopia by a goatherd named Kaldi, who got very curious about the cherry-like fruit that made his goats happy and hyper. Although the story itself is probably apocryphal, it's generally agreed that coffee was discovered in Ethiopia and spread throughout the world by the Arabs; even the ''word'' for coffee in ''virtually every language''[[note]]The exception is the languages of Ethiopia, which use the native term ''bunn'' for the drink and the bean[[/note]] has Arabic roots: the drink got the poetic name ''qahwat al-bunn'' ("the wine of the 'bunn'", "bunn" being the Ethiopic word for "coffee bean") in Arabic, which got shortened to ''qahwah''; this provided the name in the other languages of the Muslim world[[note]]Including many African languages and Persian, which took the word almost without modification[[/note]] most importantly becoming ''kahve'' in Turkish, which became ''caffè'' in Italian, and from then travelled through Europe, the Americas, and East Asia as ''Kaffee'', "coffee", ''café'', and even ''ikhofi'' and ''kāfēi''.[[note]]Respectively German, English, French/Spanish, [=isiZulu=] (the "i" is a grammatical marker), and Mandarin Chinese.[[/note]] No wonder that in Catholic Europe it was even referred to as "the wine of Islam". Italian trade with Turkey, "Syria",[[note]]Meaning what is now Lebanon, Syria, Israel/Palestine, and Jordan[[/note]] and Egypt, along with Turkish invasions of the Habsburg lands in southeastern Europe,[[note]]Supposedly, Vienna's world-famous café culture dates back to one of the two [[UsefulNotes/SiegeOfVienna Turkish sieges of the city]], where according to the legend, fleeing Turkish troops left bags of coffee that the Viennese brewed up and decided they enjoyed.[[/note]] spread the drink to the West by the 17th century, but it was widely opposed (but still drunk) until supposedly Pope Clement VIII, a downlow coffee drinker himself, blessed it around 1600; over the next century it would become popular throughout Europe.

Coffee's made in a number of ways, but they all start with dried, roasted coffee beans. Drying the coffee beans entails sloughing off the fruit coating and washing and drying the seeds. The coffee is then roasted, which gets rid of the grassy flavor of green coffee and produces the flavor compounds we normally associate with it. There are several different levels of roast; although the names aren't standardized, one way of ranking the roasts from lightest to darkest in the US would be as follows: cinnamon, city roast, full city roast (think Starbucks), Italian roast, French roast. [[note]]There is also Vienna roast, but absolutely no one agrees on what this is; you'll see it as a light roast and a dark roast.[[/note]] Like everything else about coffee, roast is SeriousBusiness; light roast fans will ridicule dark roast fans as drinking burnt coffee, while dark roast aficionados complain about acidity and underdeveloped flavor in light roasts. (Ironically, the company most responsible for creating demand for high-end coffee in the United States, Peet's, uses a darker roast than almost anyone else, including Starbucks.) Perhaps counterintuitively, the darkness of the roast and the strength of the brew have little to do with each other; the same bean, roasted dark, will actually have less caffeine in it than a light roast.

* Filtered coffee: The hot water is poured through the coffee grounds and the brewed coffee passes through a filter (usually a paper or metal mesh cone) into a carafe. The usual way of doing this is with a funnel with a filter in it, with the water coming from either a kettle or a dedicated coffee machine. Automatic drip filters, by far the most widely used, scale particularly well, and range in size from small home units of 3-12 cup capacity to massive urns found in diners and office break rooms, some of which seem large enough for a child to hide in.

* Filtered coffee: The hot water is poured through the coffee grounds and the brewed coffee passes through a filter (usually a paper or metal mesh cone) into a carafe. The usual way of doing this is with a funnel with a filter in it, with the water coming from either a kettle or a dedicated coffee machine. Automatic drip filters, by far the most widely used, scale particularly well, and range in size from small home unit of 3-12 cup capacity to massive urns found in diners and office break rooms large enough for a child to hide in.

* Filtered coffee: The hot water is poured through the coffee grounds and the brewed coffee passes through a filter (usually a paper or metal mesh cone) into a carafe. The usual way of doing this is with a funnel with a filter in it, with the water coming from either a kettle or a dedicated coffee machine. An older way of doing this is the percolator, in which the water is boiled and pushed up through the grounds and back where it came; although this makes a very nice room freshener, it also causes the brewed coffee to reboil several times over, and for the most part coffee fans don't like the result, In the US, percolators were nearly universal in the early 20th century, due to their convenience and low cost, but rapidly vanished once inexpensive automatic drip-filtered coffee machines (specifically the iconic Mr Coffee[[TradeSnark ™]]) came on the market in the early 1970s.

* Filtered coffee: The hot water is poured through the coffee grounds and the brewed coffee passes through a filter (usually a paper or metal mesh cone) into a carafe. The usual way of doing this is with a funnel with a filter in it, with the water coming from either a kettle or a dedicated coffee machine. An older way of doing this is the percolator, in which the water is boiled and pushed up through the grounds and back where it came; although this makes a very nice room freshener, it also causes the brewed coffee to reboil several times over, and for the most part coffee fans don't like the result.

The legend has it that coffee was discovered in Ethiopia by a goatherd named Kaldi, who got very curious about the cherry-like fruit that made his goats happy and hyper. Although the story itself is probably apocryphal, it's generally agreed that coffee was discovered in Ethiopia and spread throughout the world by the Arabs; even the ''word'' for coffee in ''virtually every language''[[note]]The exception is the languages of Ethiopia, which use the native term ''bunn'' for the drink and the bean[[/note]] has Arabic roots: the drink got the poetic name ''qahwat al-bunn'' ("the wine of the 'bunn'", "bunn" being the Ethiopic word for "coffee bean") in Arabic, which got shortened to ''qahwah''; this provided the name in the other languages of the Muslim world[[note]]Including many African languages and Persian, which took the word almost without modification[[/note]] most importantly becoming ''kahve'' in Turkish, which became ''caffè'' in Italian, and from then travelled through Europe, the Americas, and East Asia as ''Kaffee'', "coffee", ''café'', and even ''ikhofi'' and ''kāfēi''.[[note]]Respectively German, English, French/Spanish, [=isiZulu=] (the "i" is a grammatical marker), and Mandarin Chinese.[[/note]]No wonder that in Catholic Europe it was even referred to as "the wine of Islam". Italian trade with Turkey, "Syria",[[note]]Meaning what is now Lebanon, Syria, Israel/Palestine, and Jordan[[/note]] and Egypt, along with Turkish invasions of the Habsburg lands in southeastern Europe,[[note]]Supposedly, Vienna's world-famous café culture dates back to one of the two [[UsefulNotes/SiegeOfVienna Turkish sieges of the city]], where according to the legend, fleeing Turkish troops left bags of coffee that the Viennese brewed up and decided they enjoyed.[[/note]] spread the drink to the West by the 17th century, but it was widely opposed (but still drunk) until supposedly Pope Clement VIII, a downlow coffee drinker himself, blessed it around 1600; over the next century it would become popular throughout Europe.

Okay, coffee. The world would stop without it. People spend big money on it. It is in practically every workplace everywhere in the world. From weak, sour percolated coffee to [[KlatchianCoffee eating the grounds right out of the bag with a wet spoon]][[note]]Or, you know, coating the roasted beans in chocolate works too.[[/note]], people have come up with many, many ways to consume the most common psychoactive drug in the world.

Coffee's made in a number of ways. The first step in the preparation is drying the coffee beans, which requires sloughing off the fruit coating and washing and drying the seeds. The coffee is then roasted, which gets rid of the grassy flavor of green coffee and produces the flavor compounds we normally associate with it. There are several different levels of roast; although the names aren't standardized, one way of ranking the roasts from lightest to darkest in the US would be as follows: cinnamon, city roast, full city roast (think Starbucks), Italian roast, French roast. [[note]]There is also Vienna roast, but absolutely no one agrees on what this is; you'll see it as a light roast and a dark roast.[[/note]] Like everything else about coffee, roast is SeriousBusiness; light roast fans will ridicule dark roast fans as drinking burnt coffee, while dark roast aficionados complain about acidity and underdeveloped flavor in light roasts. (Ironically, the company most responsible for creating demand for high-end coffee in the United States, Peet's, uses a darker roast than almost anyone else, including Starbucks.) Perhaps counterintuitively, the darkness of the roast and the strength of the brew have little to do with each other; the same bean, roasted dark, will actually have less caffeine in it than a light roast.

* Pressure-brewed coffee: Better known as espresso, this is similar to filtered coffee except instead of using gravity, it uses steam pressure or some kind of pump to force hot water through fine grounds. (Single-serve coffee makers like Keurig and Senseo work on a similar principle, though at much lower pressure.) Espresso makers range from the simple Moka pot (similar to a percolator, but the coffee collects in a top reservoir and doesn't reboil) up to massive pump-powered monsters that can cost as much as a car and produce dozens or hundreds of shots of espresso in an hour. Espresso is originally from Italy, but has become the base of most of modern Western coffeehouse culture, [[GermansLoveDavidHasselhoff from Scandinavia to Japan and on]]. The café cubano of Cuba and south Florida is espresso carefully stirred together with more sugar than you'd expect it to be able to dissolve and is a nice but hard-to-find alternative to straight espresso.

Those basic methods of preparation are the base of a huge array of different drinks. When not drunk black, coffee's most common accompaniments are milk and sugar, and everyone likes it a little different; Middle Eastern coffee is sweet (except during Ramadan) and dark, espresso is syrupy with a cocoa-like bitterness and a fine foam (called crema) on top, and drip coffee is thin and sometimes faintly translucent. Espresso mixed with hot milk makes the caffè latte, the classic Italian breakfast drink and the coffee equivalent of a comforting hot chocolate; with foamed milk (using the steam wand on an electric espresso machine), you get a cappuccino, the foam-layered coffee drink named after the garb of the Capuchin monks, and a small dab of the foam gets you an espresso macchiato ("marked" or "speckled" in Italian). Add chocolate syrup to a caffè latte and you get a caffè mocha; steamed milk mixed half-and-half with drip coffee is a café au lait. In Ethiopia, different families like milk, butter, or salt (in a significant amount beyond the pinch some Americans claim brings out the flavour of very good drip coffee), with a fair bit of disgust for the addition they weren't raised on. Outside coffeehouses, drip coffee in big electric urns or small glass carafes is associated with diners and {{greasy spoon}}s, and despite the fact that it's often kind of crap, there are a lot of people who have a strong affection for the stuff (sometimes out of reverse snobbery, sometimes just because the drip coffee goes ''fantastically'' well with the heavy cuisine associated with greasy spoons). In some areas, various forms of iced coffee drinks are popular, even in the dead of winter. And flavored coffees are popular too -- hazelnut, vanilla, and almond are among the most common, but there are many, many others. Dismiss them as hot milkshakes if you wish, but they're immensely popular. (Incidentally, when you hear someone complaining about a four-dollar coffee, they're most likely talking about some elaborate espresso or frozen drink, seldom just a plain cup of coffee or espresso, which is what a lot of such statements seem to imply. Common misconception.)

** Costa Rican coffee is notable for its well-rounded flavor, like Colombian with a touch of spice, and is considered (along with Kenya's) to be the best in the world; Guatemalan coffee (of the Typica variety) is known for a cocoa-like flavor, as well as being ancestral to one of the most exclusive coffees in the world, Hawaii's Kona.

* American coffees tend to be relatively tame; Colombian coffee is very well-advertised, but flavorwise it's just a clean, slightly boring coffee good for flavored drinks, ultra-dark roasts, and a run-of-the-mill cup for breakfast. Costa Rican coffee is notable for its well-rounded flavor, like Colombian with a touch of spice, and is considered (along with Kenya's) to be the best in the world; Guatemalan coffee (of the Typica variety) is known for a cocoa-like flavor, as well as being ancestral to one of the most exclusive coffees in the world, Hawaii's Kona. Peru, Mexico, Bolivia, and Nicaragua aren't as well-known or distinctive, but produce a lot of organic coffee for American and European markets. There's even a fair bit of coffee grown around the Caribbean, for which Jamaica, Cuba, and Puerto Rico are best known. Historically, Haiti was a major producer (in 1788, it produced half the world's coffee supply, mostly around the Tiburon Peninsula in the south), but its famous revolution did irreparable damage to the industry, and by the time the country was stable enough to support coffee growing again, other countries had irretrievably replaced it in the market. Today Haiti's products are niche. Brazil is a huge coffee producer, but for some reason their coffees tend to have an iodine-like quality to them that a lot of people find off-putting; the Italians use a fair bit of Brazilian coffee (thus the blazing syrupy sourness of some Italian brands like Lavazza), but for the most part it's used as a mixer in other blends.
* Asian/Pacific coffees -- the best-known are mostly from Indonesia (the origin of "Java" as a slang term), with quite a bit grown in India and a couple of others -- tend to have a full-bodied, umami-ish flavor, frequently likened to mushrooms or even dirt. Aged and "monsooned" coffees are somewhat of a signature product from Asian countries; some of them have muddy or oily flavors. The coffee from Sulawesi, in Indonesia, is one of the most popular varietals in Japan, and can cost quite a bit compared to the more common Sumatran coffees. Indonesia is also home to kopi luwak, which is notoriously processed with the aid of the digestive tract of a species of civet[[note]]Which is a viverrid, part of a group semi-closely related to cats, hyenas, and whatever the hell the plural of mongoose is.[[/note]] (it's also made in the Philippines and Vietnam, with mostly domesticated civets). Papua New Guinea is a moderately large producer, with coffees closer to Latin American than southeast Asia; Australia has also grown coffee since the 1980s, mostly with a mild Indonesian flavor, but outside Australia itself (where an Italian-inspired espresso-based coffee culture is strong, and pre-packaged iced coffee is very popular to the point of outselling Coca-Cola in South Australia), its offerings are nearly unknown outside a few specialty circles.

* Coffee is also blended to create a specific flavor profile, evening out the differences between individual varietals. There's too many of these to count, although the first widely-sold and best known blend, Mocha Java, was created to balance the fruitiness of Yemeni Mocha and the heavy syrupiness of Java to satisfy people who weren't keen on idiosyncratic local flavors. In addition to that, you'll find generic blends like Breakfast Blend (usually a lighter coffee that won't compete with heavy breakfast foods or startle a sleepy palate[[note]]In the United States, similar coffees are sometimes referred to as "donut shop" or "diner" blends, implying that they're meant to be just like the morning coffee you grab on the way to work, but better.[[/note]]), Espresso Blend (usually, but not always, a darker roast usually containing robusta in Italy meant to produce maximum crema and flavor from the fast, high-pressure brewing process; in parts of Italy, they actually prefer a lighter-roast espresso, but that's a little unusual elsewhere), French or Italian roast (these tend to refer to very dark coffees with a nearly carbonized flavor, and usually the exact opposite of a "breakfast blend"), and, although not usually by that name, some kind of dessert blend (frequently a dark or mixed light and dark roast meant to complement rich desserts and pastries). And then there's instant coffee. Which we acknowledge the existence of, and occasionally drink, depending on the troper (truthfully it's probably better saved for cold drinks and cooking, but millions of people drink it around the world; there are many brands, but it seems that the undisputed worldwide number one is Nescafé.).

* American coffees tend to be relatively tame; Colombian coffee is very well-advertised, but flavorwise it's just a clean, slightly boring coffee good for flavored drinks, ultra-dark roasts, and a run-of-the-mill cup for breakfast. Costa Rican coffee is notable for its well-rounded flavor, like Colombian with a touch of spice, and is considered (along with Kenya's) to be the best in the world; Guatemalan coffee (of the Typica variety) is known for a cocoa-like flavor, as well as being ancestral to one of the most exclusive coffees in the world, Hawaii's Kona. Peru, Mexico, Bolivia, and Nicaragua aren't as well-known or distinctive, but produce a lot of organic coffee for American and European markets. There's even a fair bit of coffee grown around the Caribbean, for which Jamaica, Cuba, and Puerto Rico are best known; historically, Haiti was a major producer (in 1788, it produced half the world's coffee supply), but today its products are niche. Brazil is a huge coffee producer, but for some reason their coffees tend to have an iodine-like quality to them that a lot of people find off-putting; the Italians use a fair bit of Brazilian coffee (thus the blazing syrupy sourness of some Italian brands like Lavazza), but for the most part it's used as a mixer in other blends.

* American coffees tend to be relatively tame; Colombian coffee is very well-advertised, but flavorwise it's just a clean, slightly boring coffee good for flavored drinks, ultra-dark roasts, and a run-of-the-mill cup for breakfast. Costa Rican coffee is notable for its well-rounded flavor, like Colombian with a touch of spice, and is considered (along with Kenya's) to be the best in the world; Guatemalan coffee (of the Typica variety) is known for a cocoa-like flavor, as well as being ancestral to one of the most exclusive coffees in the world, Hawaii's Kona. Peru, Mexico, Bolivia, and Nicaragua aren't as well-known or distinctive, but produce a lot of organic coffee for American and European markets; there's even a fair bit of coffee grown around the Caribbean, for which Jamaica, Cuba, and Puerto Rico are best known. Brazil is a huge coffee producer, but for some reason their coffees tend to have an iodine-like quality to them that a lot of people find off-putting; the Italians use a fair bit of Brazilian coffee (thus the blazing syrupy sourness of some Italian brands like Lavazza), but for the most part it's used as a mixer in other blends.

** In the American state of Louisiana, it is common to flavor coffee with chicory, a plant whose roots, when ground and seeped in hot water, yield a bitter tasting drink. The reason is that during the American Civil War, coffee imports into Louisiana dried up because of the Union blockade of Southern ports. Chicory was drunk as a substitute. After the war, coffee became available, but there was a severe economic depression in Louisiana, and so most people continued drinking chicory. Even many who could afford coffee added chicory to it to stretch out the supply of what was a luxury good. When the economy got better, the chicory growers prevailed on the state legislature to pass a heavy tax on coffee, and the adulteration of coffee with chicory continues to this day.

Coffee, like a lot of tropical agricultural products, is often a rather exploitative business, both towards the environment and to frequently underpaid workers. Several terms are common in the coffee trade business to denote production with a mind towards ethics; organic coffee is, like any other organic product, grown without synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Shade-grown coffee refers to coffee grown in semi-wild tree groves that double as preserves for birds and other canopy wildlife (coffee sometimes grows better with some shade anyway, making it a good deal for all involved). Fair trade coffee refers to coffee purchased outside the commodity market at a higher price in order to subsidize higher wages for the growers and plantation workers. While it's fair to say these are admirable goals, they don't have any direct bearing on the quality of the product; fortunately, this will not usually be a problem, as people paying more for these coffees are still expecting to get their money's worth. (It's worth noting that in some very poor coffee-growing areas, some of the coffee in fact fits the organic and shade-grown profiles as a general matter of practicality; however, because organic certifications and the like cost some serious money, they aren't allowed to use those terms.) Coffee's even been used as part of rebuilding broken states; a large part of Rwanda's coffee output, for example, comes from efforts to use coffee to help finance rebuilding the country after the bloody civil wars of the 1990s.

Now do me a favor. This coffee is crap and I'm still sleepy, so go away before I slay you and your whole family. What, UsefulNotes/TeaAndTeaCulture? A SpotOfTea? Don't mind if I do...

* Pressure-brewed coffee: Better known as espresso, this is similar to filtered coffee except instead of using gravity, it uses steam pressure or some kind of pump to force hot water through fine grounds. (Single-serve coffee makers like Keurig and Senseo work on a similar principle, though at much lower pressure.) Espresso makers range from the simple Moka pot (similar to a percolator, but the coffee collects in a top reservoir and doesn't reboil) up to massive pump-powered monsters that can cost as much as a car and produce dozens or hundreds of shots of espresso in an hour. Espresso is originally from Italy, but has become the base of most of modern Western coffeehouse culture, [[GermansLoveDavidHasselhoff from Scandinavia to Japan and on]].

Those basic methods of preparation are the base of a huge array of different drinks. When not drunk black, coffee's most common accompaniments are milk and sugar, and everyone likes it a little different; Middle Eastern coffee is sweet (except during Ramadan) and dark, espresso is syrupy with a cocoa-like bitterness and a fine foam (called crema) on top, and drip coffee is thin and sometimes faintly translucent. Espresso mixed with hot milk makes the caffè latte, the classic Italian breakfast drink and the coffee equivalent of a comforting hot chocolate; with foamed milk (using the steam wand on an electric espresso machine), you get a cappuccino, the foam-layered coffee drink named after the garb of the Capuchin monks, and a small dab of the foam gets you an espresso macchiato ("marked" or "speckled" in Italian). Add chocolate syrup to a caffè latte and you get a caffè mocha; steamed milk mixed half-and-half with drip coffee is a café au lait. In Ethiopia, different families like milk, butter, or salt (in a significant amount beyond the pinch some Americans claim brings out the flavour of very good drip coffee), with a fair bit of disgust for the addition they weren't raised on. Outside coffeehouses, drip coffee in big electric urns or small glass carafes is associated with diners and greasy spoons, and despite the fact that it's often kind of crap, there are a lot of people who have a strong affection for the stuff. In some areas, various forms of iced coffee drinks are popular, even in the dead of winter. And flavored coffees are popular too -- hazelnut, vanilla, and almond are among the most common, but there are many, many others. Dismiss them as hot milkshakes if you wish, but they're immensely popular. (Incidentally, when you hear someone complaining about a four-dollar coffee, they're most likely talking about some elaborate espresso or frozen drink, seldom just a plain cup of coffee or espresso, which is what a lot of such statements seem to imply. Common misconception.)

* Asian/Pacific coffees -- the best-known are mostly from Indonesia (the origin of "Java" as a slang term), with quite a bit grown in India and a couple of others -- tend to have a full-bodied, umami-ish flavor, frequently likened to mushrooms or even dirt. Aged and "monsooned" coffees are somewhat of a signature product from Asian countries; some of them have muddy or oily flavors. The coffee from Sulawesi, in Indonesia, is one of the most popular varietals in Japan, and can cost quite a bit compared to the more common Sumatran coffees. Indonesia is also home to kopi luwak, which is notoriously processed with the aid of the digestive tract of a species of civet[[note]]Which is a viverrid, part of a group semi-closely related to cats, hyenas, and whatever the hell the plural of mongoose is.[[/note]] (it's also made in the Philippines and Vietnam, with mostly domesticated civets). Papua New Guinea is a moderately large producer, with coffees closer to Latin American than southeast Asia; Australia has also grown coffee since the 1980s, mostly with a mild Indonesian flavor, but outside Australia itself (where an Italian-inspired espresso-based coffee culture is strong and pre-packaged iced coffee is very popular, to the point of outselling Coca-Cola in South Australia), its offerings are nearly unknown outside a few specialty circles.

* Asian/Pacific coffees -- the best-known are mostly from Indonesia (the origin of "Java" as a slang term), with quite a bit grown in India and a couple of others -- tend to have a full-bodied, umami-ish flavor, frequently likened to mushrooms or even dirt. Aged and "monsooned" coffees are somewhat of a signature product from Asian countries; some of them have muddy or oily flavors. The coffee from Sulawesi, in Indonesia, is one of the most popular varietals in Japan, and can cost quite a bit compared to the more common Sumatran coffees. Indonesia is also home to kopi luwak, which is notoriously processed with the aid of the digestive tract of a species of civet[[note]]Which is a viverrid, part of a group semi-closely related to cats, hyenas, and whatever the hell the plural of mongoose is.[[/note]] (it's also made in the Philippines and Vietnam, with mostly domesticated civets). Papua New Guinea is a moderately large producer, with coffees closer to Latin American than southeast Asia; Australia has also grown coffee since the 1980s, mostly with a mild Indonesian flavor, but its offerings are nearly unknown outside a few specialty circles.

** Israelis, being an odd sort, skip all the effort used in making the coffee palatable and just spoon some of the near-eastern grounds into a mug before pouring in some hot water. The name for this drink translates fairly directly to "mud coffee."