Tell me what's in the cup. I'll tell you the one thing to change.

Where the name comes from

Coffee reached the Arabian Peninsula by the 1400s, and by the 1500s the coffeehouses of Persia, Turkey, and Egypt were being called "schools of the wise." When it got to Europe, the story goes, clergy wanted it banned as the bitter invention of Satan, until Pope Clement VIII tasted it and gave it his blessing. Within a century London had hundreds of coffeehouses. A penny bought a cup and a seat in the argument, which is why people called them penny universities. Lloyd's of London started as a table at Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse; the stock exchange started at Jonathan's.

Historians have argued ever since that the Enlightenment owes something to those rooms: a sober, caffeinated public talking across class lines for the first time, at a time when the alternative was the alehouse. That's the idea this site was named for in 2020, when it was a review site and that was a business. The reviews are gone. What's left is the part that was always the point: a better cup, and someone to talk it through with.