Coffee World
Not a place on the map: a walk through the kinds of rooms the world has built to drink coffee in.
What it is about
Coffee World has no single address, so it has no map course. Its subject is the coffee house itself. Coffee drinking spread from Yemen through the Ottoman world in the 15th and 16th centuries, and with it came a new kind of public room where people sat, talked and read. Coffee houses reached the trading cities of Europe in the 17th century and have been part of city life ever since.
Those rooms took many shapes, and the course collects them: courtyards open to the sky, such as the riad, the inward-looking courtyard house of Morocco; halls of iron and glass; arcades; bookshops; and the working buildings of the trade, where beans are stored, roasted and shipped.
The picture course
Every hole is a floor plan. The pictures look straight down into a building or a street with the roof taken off, drawn in fine line and muted colour, and the fairway is a straight green carpet laid down the middle of the room. The round passes a lattice-shaded courtyard, a glasshouse, an old banking hall with its vault door, a roastery with copper drums, a station platform, a tiled riad with a fountain, a red theatre, an arcade, a harbour warehouse, a mountain hut in the snow, a rooftop, a fountain square, a bookshop, a watermill, a cellar of barrels, a quay, an alley hung with lights, and a great roasting hall to finish.
Par 72 over 5,457 m: 4 par threes, 10 par fours and 4 par fives. The front nine is par 37 (2,891 m) and the back nine par 35 (2,566 m). The longest hole is number 5, a par 5 of 498 m; the shortest is number 3, a par 3 of 125 m.
| Hole | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Par | 4 | 4 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 4 | 5 | 4 | 4 |
| m | 303 | 306 | 125 | 295 | 498 | 295 | 485 | 298 | 286 |
| Hole | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 |
| Par | 4 | 5 | 3 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 4 | 3 | 5 |
| m | 291 | 461 | 138 | 297 | 302 | 141 | 294 | 148 | 494 |
Par and distances are the game's own course data. The pins are real places listed in Wikidata; what is said about them is kept to well-known facts.
How it plays
Because the fairways are straight and the walls are close, this is a course for accuracy rather than length. The room is the hazard: anything off the carpet is out among the tables.
More courses
Sources: Coffeehouse · History of coffee · Riad (architecture) · Wikidata (CC0)