Cafés & Coffee
Roast level is a decision about acidity, not about strength
What happens inside a bean between light and dark, and why the local default sits at the dark end.
Cafés & Coffee
How coffee works here, what to order, and where to sit for an hour.
21 articles · updated August 11, 2026 · page 1 of 2
Cafés & Coffee
How to order coffee in Lisbon without overthinking it
The vocabulary is small, the coffee is cheap, and standing at the counter costs less than sitting down.
More in Cafés & Coffee
Cafés & Coffee
Why the same beans taste different in two cafes
Identical coffee from the same roaster can land completely differently a hundred metres apart, and the reasons are mechanical.
Cafés & Coffee
Portuguese espresso is not a smaller Italian one
The local cup shares a machine with Italy and very little else, from the bean up.
Cafés & Coffee
What steaming actually does to milk
The texture in a good milk coffee is protein and air held in a fat structure, and there are precise ways to ruin it.
Cafés & Coffee
Grind is the dial that moves everything else
Every other brewing variable is downstream of how finely the coffee was ground, and most home problems start here.
Cafés & Coffee
Espresso and filter are two answers to the same bean
Pressure, ratio and contact time separate them, and the split explains why a cafe good at one may be indifferent at the other.
Cafés & Coffee
How coffee goes stale, and what actually slows it down
Oxygen and time do the damage, and most domestic storage advice makes one of them worse.
Cafés & Coffee
The four ways caffeine gets taken out of a bean
Decaf is a manufacturing process applied before roasting, and the process used explains most of the difference in the cup.
Cafés & Coffee
Arabica and robusta are two different plants with two different problems
The species split is agricultural before it is culinary, and it explains price, caffeine and why blends here taste the way they do.
Cafés & Coffee
Counter, table, terrace: the three prices for one coffee
The same cup can cost noticeably different amounts within four metres, and the system is posted rather than hidden.
Cafés & Coffee
The working day of a cafe, hour by hour
A neighbourhood cafe passes through four or five completely different businesses between opening and closing.