Issue 26: Rivers, waves, and coffee

In Issue 26, we talk with the award-winning coffee producer Karla Boza about her move towards specialty coffee after realizing she and her father were being ripped off by coffee traders, and to Joshua Norris, an activist and educator working in Northern California to preserve the ancestral practices of the Yurok Tribe.You’ll meet three leaders working to bring coffee’s troubled history to light through their businesses, and in this issue’s long-form essay, you’ll ponder along with us on the important subject of decolonizing the history of coffee, for a better future.But the history of coffee and its injustices can’t possibly be tackled in one essay. We go further by suggesting a completely new origin story for coffee, and arguing that we should do away with the overly simplistic three-wave model when it comes to making sense of where we stand in coffee’s timeline.Our photo essay profiles and asks what we can learn from five of London’s more seasoned baristas, who work in an industry dominated by the young. We tackle the science behind how ambient café sounds can improve creativity and help us to work better, before gambolling about Ljubljana, the city that flowered among the vestiges of three empires.