All in all, this was a great week for coffee on public radio.

Coffee Quiz: Discover The World In A Cup of Joe - by NPR Staff.

Bay Ismoyo/AFP/Getty Images (NPR)

How Coffee Brings The World Together – by Dan Charles.

Journey Of A Specialty Coffee Bean, From Cherry To Cup - by Allison Aubrey.

Photo by Josh Bletchely (NPR)

Newspaper Takes The Pulse Of San Diego Coffee Culture - by Eliza Barclay.

Via Hulton Archive/Getty Images (NPR)

How Coffee Influenced The Course of History – by Lydia Zuraw, featuring Mark Pendergrast.

Photo by Dan Charles (NPR)

Coffee For A Cause: What Do Those Feel-Good Labels Deliver? - by Dan Charles.

Photo by Kazuki Yamamoto (NPR)

Masterpiece In A Mug: Japanese Latte Art Will Perk You Up - by Maria Godoy.

David Gilkey (NPR)

Step Aside, Gents. Witness The Rise Of Women In Coffee - by Allison Aubrey.

Photo by Christopher Furlong for Getty Images (NPR)

EU Embraces ‘Suspended Coffee’: Pay It Forward With A Cup Of Joe - by Sylvia Poggioli.

VIDEO: The NPR Virtual Coffeehouse - by Maria Godoy.

Photo by Dan Charles (NPR)

Exploring Coffee’s Past To Rescue Its Future - by Dan Charles.

Via istockphoto.com (NPR)

Why Caffeine In Coffee Is A Miracle Drug For The Tired - by Eliza Barclay.

via Youtube

So Jerry Seinfeld Called Us To Talk About Coffee - by NPR Staff.

Did one of these posts particularly strike your fancy? Sound off in the comments below!

The post Buzzing The Airwaves: Coffee Week On National Public Radio’s Morning Edition appeared first on Sprudge.com.

In a 2009 profile of then-Cardinal Jose Mario Bergoglio, Spanish magazine La Nacion dropped this juicy piece of gossip about his infrequent work trips to Rome (translated): “I like to walk the Italian capital and take ristretto in cafeterias, leaning against the counter.” NPR reports that the new Pope, now a full-time Rome resident (obviously), likes to cook for himself, and while it’s doubtful he can still take those solitary walks around the Eternal City, Pope Francis has established himself as a kind of “People’s Pope” – he has a Twitter account, for example, and he’s chosen to live in a modest apartment instead of the grand Papal Quarters in Vatican City. So who knows? Maybe this is the Pope you most want to have a cafe corretto with.

Popes loving coffee is nothing new. In fact, it was Pope Clement VIII (Pope from 1592-1605) may have been integral to the influence of coffee’s popularity (pope-ularity?) Take it away, Wikipedia:

Coffee aficionados often claim that the spread of its popularity is due to Pope Clement VIII’s influence. Being pressured by his advisers to declare coffee the “bitter invention of Satan” because of its popularity among Muslims and it being a sort of antithesis or substitute for wine (which was used in the Eucharist), upon tasting it he instead declared that, “This devil’s drink is so delicious…we should cheat the devil by baptizing it.” The year often cited is 1600. It is not clear whether this is a true story, but it may have been found amusing at the time.

We like to think of this Pope as going on sitcom-esque jaunts around the city solo, much to the chagrin of his kindly and frustrated Papal body guards. Slipping into Sant’Eustachio il Caffe for a ristretto with a kiss of sugar, ducking down the narrow passageways of the Travestere with a pack of hip young revelers, and who knows, perhaps enjoying a late-night espresso & grappa at one of the many clubs near the Colosseum? YOPO – You Only Pope Once!

The post The Pope Prefers Ristretto, And Other Fun Papal Coffee Facts appeared first on Sprudge.com.

Allison Aubrey writes for NPR’s The Salt blog, who today published this feature on four East African coffee producers visiting DC as part of a trip funded by the International Women’s Coffee Alliance and the International Trade Centre’s Women in Coffee Project. The four women are representatives of Burundi, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Kenya, and their stories are fascinating.

Mbula Musau of Kenya holds one of the most coveted titles in the coffee industry: certified Q-grader. This means buyers know that she knows her stuff when it comes to grading the quality of a coffee bean. And she’s also served as a sensory judge at the World Barista Championship competition.

She now works on the trade and marketing side of the industry, but as a “sister of coffee,” as she calls herself, she wants to help empower women involved at all levels of coffee production in her country. “The majority of labor is women,” Musua explains. By connecting them with women around the world, “it creates hope.” And, she hopes, opportunities, too.

Read Allison Aubrey’s excellent feature here via NPR.org, and while you’re at it, spend some time with Laetitia Mukandahiro, who hopes to someday become “the Rwandan Katie Carguilo.”

The post “Women’s handprints can be found at every point in coffee…” appeared first on Sprudge.com.

Another article on Kopi Luwak is floating around the internets. It’s just going to keep happening. The story of coffee via an animal’s digestive tract sells. The latest is from Claire O’Neill from The Salt, NPR’s food blog.

To her credit, she interviews some smart folks, brings up most of the negative aspects of the product (animal cruelty, poor quality, its overall lameness) and her takeaway is great:

At the end of the day, we all readily drank coffee from an animal’s feces.

There’s also an excellent comparison of the animal’s feces to an Oh, Henry candy bar. We think it probably looks more like a Baby Ruth, a la Caddyshack:

Kopi fucking luwak, you’re like a Batman villain, and no matter how many times we try to kill you, you just…will not…die.

The post Ugggh: NPR Tackles That Cat Poop Coffee Thing appeared first on Sprudge.com.

From our ever-expanding MSM “bad coffee pun headline” department, a pretty-darn-not-bad feature out of NPR NYC, authored by “All Things Condisered” host Amy Eddings and featuring an interview with Dallis Bros. gal-about-town Teresa von Fuchs:

Teresa von Fuchs, the coffee and espresso consultant for Dallis Bros. Coffee, thinks cold-brew is unfairly getting a cold shoulder: “When you taste them side by side, I think both ways are equally good. Just different.”

She met me at Root Hill Café in Gowanus, in Brooklyn to demonstrate. We sampled a Colombian coffee, Cerro del Reyes, made two ways — cold-brewed, and hot-to-ice brewed. We sampled them at two temperatures, room temp and with ice, the way you’d get it if you ordered an iced coffee.

…My view? I prefer the hot-to-ice brewed coffee better. But I can see von Fuch’s point. Both methods made a solid glass of iced coffee, expressing something different about the bean in the same way that different hot brewing processes — pour over, percolator, espresso — do.

The article, unfortunately titled “A Hot Debate over Cold-Brewed Coffee”, also includes this intensely popular Japanese Iced Coffee Method video from Peter Giuliano and Temsy Chen, which has been blogged and reblogged around the world, with views ranging well past the 30,000 mark:

30,000 views and counting, as it’s now been included in Oliver Strand’s latest feature for the T Magazine blog, ominously entitled “I Know What You Did Last Summer“.

The post NPR Thinks Iced Coffee’s Cool, And Other Bad Headlines appeared first on Sprudge.com.