Coffee and Tea are relatively late comers to the Middle East compared with wine. However, they have established themselves as prized beverages quickly and developed an elaborate social and literary life. They are subject to love poems and panegyrics, including their cooks and servers, their equipment, such as the pots and cups in which they are cooked and served, their garnishes, such as milk and mint, and the ceremonies through which the social rituals of gathering around coffee and tea are performed. In these, the classical wine song is revived and refashioned, and aesthetics (as well as ethics and politics) of coffee and tea emerged to reflect on the times and places of their consumption. This presentation takes as its subject the disputation (mushājara and khiṣām) between tea and wine, and tea and coffee in Arabic writings from the 18th through the 20th centuries, to ponder the role of commodities, such as tea, coffee and wine, as well as their paraphernalia, such as pots and cups, and their ritual consumption in informing an alternative method of doing comparative literature and world literature. It brings intercultural life of things into the fabric of both the social life and literary life of things and suggests that aestheticism can travel around the world outside translation.