Silver Spiral Archives (with Meilo Thench)

Coffee and Koba

I am still combing through some notes and textdocs before I move further into my series on The Dividing War. I've spent a rather shocking number of hours of my life as a researcher hunched over my personal terminal as well as many public ones, but I have never been too far from a steady supply of koba. I prefer koba to the Terran coffee, but it is most assuredly known that the coffee bean, introduced by the arrival of the Terrans into our galaxy had quickly supplanted Koba as the most widely consumed stimulant in the galaxy.

The koba leaf and coffee bean are both drugs, or at least have elements of drugs within them. In a very strange convergence of evolution across the galaxy, both contain a chemical called caffeine. This isn't the first simultaneous development of similar things across different parts of the universe, of course, but it is curiously mundane. This is something I am not remotely qualified to educate anyone on, but maybe I can write about some of this stuff for the future.

Regardless, the koba leaf was first domesticated and grown as a chewable stimulant by kemezeckians who harvested the beachside shrub where the leaves are found. Kemezeckians would quickly create seaside farms to raise large koba crops. It wasn't until the hauke began to dry the leaves to concentrate them that the beverage became the more common form of consumption. Early brewed koba was essentially a tea with energetic properties until around 200 years ago when blassnaught began to ferment it. This, of course, resulted in the popular alcoholic beverage fermentea. That is a topic for another time.

Koba was quick to become a major source of energy for spacers as the ground, dried leaves took well to preservatives and additional supplements. Simple bricks or pucks of powdered koba stored particularly well and could be easily slotted into brewed tech that quickly became a staple of most equipment sets necessary for space flight. In particular, a hot cup of koba was a welcome sight for many returning from spacewalks and ship maintenance and heating was prohibitively expensive for long periods of time.

Around the introductions of Terrans to the larger galaxy, curious aliens quickly took notice of a hot, brown beverage brewed from beans that human colonists carried with them in their own ships. One of the first crops planted at their own colonies included this curious bean. The coffee bean was something that seemed to acclimate well to some early colonies, and humans essentially found one of their first major contributions to the galactic economy by holding the source of this rapidly ascendant resource in a tight grasp. Such a tight grasp that during the first few decades of coffee growing, humans were particularly litigious and secretive about the growing process, often using guarded hyper-growth houses to streamline production, but more importantly, it prevented the beans from becoming widespread.

Coffee was particularly influential during the long, drawn-out campaigns of The Dividing War as humans were quick to engineer their products into similar pucks and bricks used by the common brewers. Because of the strength of the coffee bean's caffeine content in comparison to the koba leaf in their respective natural states, coffee quickly began to explode into markets and provided a certain, more intense buzz that was needed. The Terran's proprietary control over what would become a resource, however, proved to be an issue.

Just shortly after the founding of the Federation, which is where Terrans found their allegiance, the Federation turned to them and demanded access to the coffee bean. Having no other real option, the humans provided seeds and guide to other races in the Federation, allowing for a larger coffee boom to sweep over and cementing the coffee bean as the stronger source of caffeine. That being said, however, Terran coffee products are widely considered to be the best on the market and still very much command premium pricing.

While koba and coffee beans exist simultaneously, it is clear that coffee as supplanted the original caffeinated beverage of the Silver Spiral. As for me, I find coffee too acidic and bitter, but that is perhaps where koba's niche is in all of this.

Did you enjoy the lore? You can read more Cosmic Dash stories at cosmicdash.com!