The words of coffee & tea, plain.

Decaf is a working glossary of the words people actually use around coffee and tea — the vocabulary that turns up on a bag of beans, a café menu, a brewer's manual, or in the middle of an argument about whether a certain word means what someone thinks it means. It covers nine areas, from brewing methods and grinding through espresso, milk drinks, tea types, tea brewing, tasting and equipment. Entries are short on purpose: enough to settle what a word means and when to use it, and nothing more.

Every entry has the same four parts, so you always know where to look. The definition states the term in plain language, including the parts of it people genuinely disagree about. A short etymology note traces where the word came from, which is often the quickest way to understand why it means what it does — most brewing vocabulary is borrowed, translated, or quietly misapplied. An "in use" line drops the term into a real sentence so you can hear how it behaves in conversation. Longer entries add a section or two on the practical detail behind the term, plus a short FAQ.

There are three ways in. Browse the glossary index, where every term is grouped under one of the nine categories. Jump to the A–Z list if you already know the word and want its page. Or follow the related-terms links at the foot of an entry, which are the fastest route sideways into the vocabulary around a word — from flat white to ristretto to yield. The English and Chinese editions are both written by hand; neither is a translation of the other, and neither is machine-generated.