Coffee (color)
color

Coffee is a brownish color that is a representation of a roasted coffee bean. Different types of coffee beans have different colors when roasted—the color coffee represents an average.
The first recorded use of coffee as a color name in English was in 1695.
The normalized color coordinates for coffee are identical to Tuscan brown, which was first recorded as a color name in English in 1913.
Variations of coffee
Café au Lait
The color displayed at right is café au lait, also known as coffee and milk or latte. This is a representation of the color of coffee mixed with milk, which when prepared commercially by a barista in a coffee shop is known as a latte.
The first recorded use of cafe au lait as a color name in English was in 1839.
The normalized color coordinates for café au lait are identical to Tuscan tan and French beige, which were first recorded as color names in English in 1926 and 1927, respectively.
Café Noir
The color displayed at right is café noir, also known as black coffee. It is a representation of the color of brewed black coffee.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Coffee (color)” is color. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Coffee and color, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 8, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q2932937. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1695, 1913, 1839 and 1926.
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This entry incorporates text from “Coffee (color)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.