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If you love hearing about the history of coffee, chances are you know about The History of Coffee Podcast series, created by Professor Jonathan Morris, author of Coffee. A Global History and documentary maker James Harper. If you haven’t, get over there and start listening. It’s a fascinating walk through coffee’s history and it dispels a lot of myths that have been fostered over coffee for decades and even centuries. We’ll cover the podcast a bit more below.
Saturday, April 17, at 12:00pm BST time (13:00GMT, 9:00am EDT, 6:00am PDT) is a very special time if you are a fan of this kind of thing, because both Morris and Harper will be joined by Professor Peter D’Sena of the Royal Historical Society and they will be doing a live bonus edition of the History of Coffee at the London Coffee Festival’s Virtual Fringe. The main topic for the live discussion is decolonising coffee history, unpacking how colonialism created the unequal coffee world we know today. From the pre-show notes:
Each sip of coffee we drink is steeped in dark colonial past. The reason we can enjoy it all every morning is because it’s relatively cheap, and many people suffered under European colonizers to create the systems that produce this cheap coffee.
The live event is going out over Instagram Live; so make sure you set your alarm clocks if you’re on the west coast of the USA, or for 9am if you’re eastern side. It should be highly entertaining and informative.
More on the History of Coffee Podcast
This podcast is fantastic. The goal of the creators is to unpack and in many ways, demystify and de-myth the commonly known history of coffee. In a conversation with Morris, he detailed the purpose of the six part podcast.
“The series aims to correct the often factually misleading popular narratives surrounding coffee’s history and replace it with a focus on the people and aspects that are often ignored: the first Middle Eastern coffee traders, the black enslaved Africans transported to work on Caribbean plantations, the destruction of virgin Brazilian forests to meet the demand for coffee from the USA, and the ways that the global terms of trade have evolved to the detriment of producers.” Morris says.
On top of the link at the beginning of this post, the podcast series is is also on Spotify.
About the author
Mark has certified as a Canadian, USA, and World Barista Championship Judge in both sensory and technical fields, as well as working as an instructor in coffee and espresso training. He started CoffeeGeek in 2001.