This blog will focus mainly (but not exclusively) on coffee cultivation past and present. The blog’s title, “coffee cultures,” plays on multiple senses of the word “culture,” referring on the one hand to ‘the customs, civilization, and achievements of particular times and pople’; and on the other hand to ‘the cultivation of plants and the soil.’ It will occasionally follow the life of coffee beyond the farm, from ‘plantation to cup,’ since coffee production and consumption are intimately intertwined. I hope that this blog will become a complement to the superb Coffee and Conservation blog, which I follow regularly. This blog will have more of a historical flavour, focusing on coffee production in the past as well as the present. It will also pay attention to the origins and development of the many different coffee cultures operating today, including the conventional ‘commodity’ coffees, as well as specialty and certified coffees. In short, we’ll be talking about “good” coffee and “bad” coffee alike, and also pondering what it means for different kinds of coffee (and different kinds of coffee cultivation) to be judged as “good” or “bad.”