Coffee Tastes Different in the UK and the US

Coffee, once you step outside the world of simply drinking it and start actually tasting it, is a world of many descriptors.

I have always associated certain Kenyan coffees with a typical blackcurrant taste, never realising that they referred to it with a different fruit on the other side of the atlantic.

Peter Giuliano explains the historical and botanical reason for this split.

The reaction was to pass the Plant Quarantine Act of 1912 which, among other things, prohibited the farming of blackcurrants, effectively outlawing them in the United States. […] The delicious fruit of the blackcurrant was not to be seen or tasted anywhere in the United States after that.