Coffee & Tea Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which is not a single tea but a blend, typically of robust black teas such as Assam, Ceylon and Kenyan, put together to be strong, full-bodied and brisk enough to stand up to milk and to wake a drinker up, and named for the meal it is meant to accompany?

Question 2

Which coffee processing method, associated especially with Costa Rica, removes the cherry skin but leaves some or all of the sticky inner layer, the mucilage, on the bean while it dries, sitting flavour-wise between the clean washed style and the fruit-forward natural style?

Question 3

Which drink is cold-brewed coffee charged with nitrogen gas and poured from a pressurised tap, so it cascades in the glass, settles under a thick creamy head, and tastes smooth and almost sweet with no milk or sugar added?

Question 4

Which caffeinated South American drink is made by steeping the dried leaves of a species of holly in hot water, traditionally in a hollowed gourd, and sipped through a metal straw with a filter tip, the same gourd refilled and passed around a group as a social ritual?

Question 5

Which city has a coffee-house culture listed by UNESCO as intangible heritage, with a founding legend that sacks of green beans were left behind when an Ottoman army abandoned its siege in 1683, and a signature drink of espresso with steamed milk called a Melange?

Question 6

Which small Chinese teapot is made from a porous, unglazed purple-brown stoneware clay from a region near a lake in Jiangsu province, is traditionally used for only one type of tea because it absorbs and returns flavour over years of use, and is never washed with detergent?

Question 7

Which institution grew out of a late-17th-century London coffee house, run by Edward Lloyd, whose customers were ship owners, captains and merchants and where marine insurance began to be arranged over the tables?

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About Coffee & Tea

Coffee and tea are the two drinks that most of the world reaches for first thing in the morning, and between them they have started wars, funded empires, built cities of conversation and reorganised whole economies. This quiz covers about eighty things you can know about them: the plants and how they are processed, the brewing gear and the drinks it makes, the growing regions and their famous names, and the history that runs from a Yemeni Sufi lodge to a New York merchant's accidental tea bag.

Every question describes one, a species, a method, a style, a term, a place or a person, and asks you to name it from four choices. The explanation then fills in the detail: what oxidation actually does to a tea leaf, why a flat white is not a small latte, how the honey process got its misleading name, what a peaberry is, and why Ceylon grows tea at all.

A few threads run through it. Both drinks are really one plant each doing many jobs: all true tea, from white to black to aged pu-erh, is Camellia sinensis handled differently, and most of the world's coffee is one of two species with very different temperaments. Both were spread by empire and conflict: a botanist sent to steal China's tea secrets for British India, the opium trade built to pay for the tea habit, a leaf-rust fungus that turned Ceylon from a coffee island into a tea one, a tax revolt in a Boston harbour.

The quiz gives real weight to the gear and the vocabulary, because that is where most people get lost. On the coffee side: the moka pot and the French press and the pour-over and the AeroPress, and the difference between a ristretto, a lungo and a doppio, a cortado and a flat white, an americano and a long black. On the tea side: the gaiwan and the yixing pot and the samovar, the six colour classes and what oxidation and roasting and post-fermentation each do, and the named teas, Darjeeling and Assam and Keemun, Longjing and Tieguanyin, sencha and gyokuro and matcha.

The quiz also settles the everyday confusions: that 'chai tea' means 'tea tea', that decaf is not caffeine-free, that high tea is not the fancy one, that most 'wasabi' is fake and most 'kopi luwak' worse, that iced coffee and cold brew are different drinks. Where a photograph of loose tea, a device or a bean would not simply give the answer to someone who already knows it, it is shown; the instantly recognisable ones are left as text.

The payoff is that the cafe menu and the tea aisle stop being a wall of jargon. Learn what distinguishes an oolong from a black tea, a ristretto from a lungo, a washed coffee from a natural one, and you can order, and brew, with intent. Every claim has been checked against reliable sources, and the wording is kept plain.