Java, joe, brew, mud. All these and more are nicknames for one of the most popular beverages in the world: coffee. We brew it at home, wait in drive-through lineups for it, and warm our hands around it in hockey arenas. So pour a cup and enjoy a closer look at this ancient brew.
Sometimes, it can seem like taking that first sip of fresh, hot java is the most important part of the morning. But coffee means so much more than that to so many people. This video takes a look at the ways fair-trade coffee is allowing farmers to better their lives.
No idea if artist Karen Eland drinks coffee, but she does do something far more interesting with it: recreates famous masterpieces with espresso instead of paint. She’s reproduced artists from Da Vinci to Van Gogh, and often adds a cup of coffee to her famous subjects? portraits. Whistler’s Mocha, anyone?
Artists Andrew Saur and Angel Sarkela-Saur also paint in coffee, but their online gallery goes beyond portraits and includes conceptual themes, nature themes, wildlife themes, and more. The idea of using coffee as a medium struck them when an upcoming show was planned to take place in a coffee house. You’ll be amazed at the results.
The professional baristas make it look so easy: those fun and intricate designs on your latte. If you’ve got an espresso machine at home, why not create some of that art yourself? This Monkey See series offers great step-by-step guides to everything from extracting the perfect espresso to pouring an inverted rosetta.
National Geographic goes beyond the basics of your mocha machiatto to 800 CE. That’s when, as legend has it, an Ethiopian goatherd named Kaldi ?noticed his herd dancing from one coffee shrub to another, grazing on the cherry-red berries containing the beans.? Follow the history of coffee, check out maps of the world’s coffee regions, and find out just how those green beans become liquid gold.