Raktajinos. Klingon coffee.
I've been thinking about their name for a bit (the "coffee" part, not the "raktajino" part), and I think there are four possible explanations for why it's called "coffee".
- It's a drink made by brewing a (roasted) bean, and all drinks from varying planets which are made in this way are given the title "coffee".
- It's literally coffee (like the Earth plant), and Klingon's either have a special brewing/roasting method, or they've bred it to create a new variant. (However, thanks to Trials and Tribbleations, we do know that raktajinos existed during the time of TOS - which, since klingons and humans were on very bad terms, does imply - they stole it. They stole the coffee. They stole a little plant from earth and said, "we can improve upon this," and then did.)
- It just tastes similar, and humans said, "eh, that's basically coffee," and the epitaph stuck.
- It fills a similar cultural niche (ie. a non-alcoholic (typically) hot (typically) caffinated beverage often consumed in the morning.) while not having characteristics that would instead classify it as a different drink (so, not tea, even though tea is ALSO often hot and caffinated and drunk in the morning, because tea is brewed with leaves, and raktajinos are not.)
And, of course multiple of these could be true at once - it could both taste like coffee and fill the same cultural niche.
4 certainly appears to be the way the DS9 crew treat raktajinos - it just replaces coffee, but with a fancy alien name now - so I'm thinking that the cultural niche part might be true, but just because humans use it like that doesn't mean that klingons did, and I still wonder a bit about the rest of it. Does it taste like coffee? Is it related to human coffee? How's it made?
How much relation to human coffee does something need to earn the name "coffee"?
@nonasuch tag preservation: #I choose to believe that at least once in an ill-fated attempt to capitalize on a traditional human holiday#quark replicated some baileys and tried serving ‘irish raktajino’ for st patrick’s day#miles took one sip spit it out and shut the whole thing down#star trek#deep space nine
