If possible, rinse or dab the place coffee lands immediately with cold water and then follow up with your preferred cleaning agent. Whether it’s your shirt, the carpet or your cup, keeping coffee’s moisture from evaporating before you dilute it will prevent the stain from setting.

When a coffee stain dries, an interesting coffee-ring phenomenon occurs. Please note that the edge of the droplet (the contact line) gets ‘pinned’ at points on the surface,” creating a coffee ring.

For clothing or other household fabrics that can be washed in the washing machine, apply your stain-removing alkaline cleaner and allow it to soak the stain for half an hour before washing. The added wait will help dissolve the stain.

Remember to wash with cold water, because heat naturally causes stains to set in porous materials like fabric or even your teeth. Another thing to keep in mind is that some fabrics are more stain-prone than others.

Coffee sticks to different fabrics with varying tenacity: “Coffee stain has little affinity to polyester fibers but adheres to cotton and even more firmly to nylon.

Therefore depending on what type of fabric fiber your coffee stains different cleaning agents may need to be employed, with nylon being the trickiest for stain removal.

For nylon, a stain remover containing bleach may be your only solution, but it will require care to avoid discoloring the dye used in the fabric. However, alkaline detergents and cleaners containing Hydrogen Peroxide or baking soda should work on polyester or cotton.