Tasting Notes

Revise the story you thought you knew.

Margaret Atwood: "To know what you devour is to consecrate it, almost." But how can anyone know the fullness of this genus Coffea, with its more than 124 species? Coffee is never only one thing.

Seventy percent of the world's coffee is misnamed, thanks to a story created by a Swedish botanist. Obsessed with classifying plants, when Carl Linnaeus saw a dried coffee branch in a greenhouse in the Netherlands, he knew it wasn't Jasminum arabicum, as a French botanist had named it. Linnaeus created a new genus: Coffea. But for all his taxonomical specificity, he was wrong about its epithet, for when he published its full name as Coffea arabica in 1753, he didn't know that its origin wasn't anywhere in Arabia. The seed came first from Africa, in the Kaffa region of southwestern Ethiopia, once called Abyssinia. Later, even after Linnaeus acknowledged Ethiopia as its birthplace, it was too late. The misnomer lingers on.

Coffee and colonialism have tangled ever since. Coffea was forced through many lands, including the part of British East Africa now called Kenya. There, the tools of men ravished forests and women for the sake of Coffea's cash profits. Covetousness was renamed land title deeds; avarice labeled community development.

During Kenya's Mau Mau revolution in the 1950s, thousands of women, imprisoned by British colonial officers who hired African men to guard them, were forced to clear forests for coffee plantations and dig ditches for coffee trees. Their reward? Less than half the meager income their husbands earned and violence too horrific to name.

Still, trees blossomed white flowers, covering Kenya with the scent of jasmine honeysuckle. Flowers transform to plump red cherries. The seed inside—not really a bean—will become green coffee that ships from port to port, passing through dozens of hands before it is roasted brown and transformed into drink.

This joe, this wine of Islam, this liquid gold, this devil's brew: What we pay in cash, others have paid in sweat and blood. Bitterness is not a taste, but a sensation of dryness in the mouth.