Clearly Coffee

If you’ve taken any trips to Italy in the last five years and you’re a third wave coffee snob who insists on high end coffee and carefully curated beans, then you were probably surprised to find that third wave style high end coffee and espressos are barely available there at all, and mostly only cater to tourists!

Part of the problem is the Italian government itself. The government insists that espresso should be affordable to the average Italian, so it’s not possible to sell a lot of high end drinks at a price of around 1 euro. Low prices have left Italian coffee shops where they are almost frozen in time. Of course it’s great to enjoy a traditional experience when you visit Italy, and the coffee definitely isn’t terrible there! In fact, there plenty of people who would argue that a traditional Italian shot of espresso is simply the best tasting coffee you can get, period.

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I recently purchased the 8 oz sized Sttoke (also commonly misspelled as Stoke) coffee cup, after seeing a Facebook ad.

The ad and web site makes it seem as if the cup is made of unbreakable ceramic, but what you actually get is a steel cup with a ceramic coating made by the German coating company Greblon. This is probably better, since steel really is unbreakable. But I was expecting something actually made of ceramic, even though I was wondering at the same time how it would be unbreakable if it was really ceramic.

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When you look at this list of top coffee exporting countries, it’s a little confusing. Why do European countries rank so highly in the list when no one grows coffee in these countries? The answer is that many of these countries have major coffee manufacturing brands and they bring in beans from all over the world, and then export the packaged coffee to other countries.

This list of coffee exporting companies is organized in the order of the amount of coffee exported, which means that Brazil exports the most coffee from this list, and Costa Rica exports the least.

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There are so many different ways to make coffee. You might not think so, since it’s literally just a recipe of ground coffee beans and water. But there are almost an unlimited number of ways to vary the recipe, and dozens of different specialized coffee machine types to make it with.

This is a list of all the different coffee machine / coffee maker types we could come up with. Is there a type of coffee maker that we missed? Let us know. (We’re thinking of a general type of coffee maker, and not really just a specific brand of coffee maker, unless the brand is also the only way that you make coffee using that method.)

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Have you ever wondered how many different coffee drinks you can make and what they’re like? We did. So we started gathering up every different coffee drink we could find.

Did we miss anything? If so, tell us in the comments and hopefully give us a link to how to make it too so we can verify.

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Looking for real, authentic Kona coffee? It can be hard to find! Much of what is called “Kona coffee” is really just a blend, with only a very small percentage of coffee beans grown in Hawaii on the island of Kona.

We’ve created this master list of all the real Kona coffee brands that we could find.

Did we miss any brands of real Kona coffee? Please let us know in the comments.

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QUESTION: Can I use K Cups twice? I buy Starbucks K Cups, and they’re fairly expensive. I was thinking I could save a lot of money by using them more than once. Would it work?

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QUESTION: Are K Cups Real Coffee? I see K Cups at hotels all over the place, and I use them and it’s pretty good, but I wasn’t sure if it’s actually coffee or not. Robby W

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