COFFEE, WHAT YOU DIDN'T KNOW!

Coffee begins as a small green bean--with hardly any flavor or aroma until it's roasted--but it provides a living for over 25 million people around the world. Entire countries depend upon its production and trade.
In the harsh poverty of post war Europe coffee was even used as money. In the Wild West, brewed thick and strong on open fires, it was used by cowboys as sustenance.
Coffee has begee an essential part of life. Mornings need those rich, sensuous aromas. In the workplace we welgee the coffee break--a World War II innovation that recognized the value of coffee stimulation--as a way to "get sharp and keep going."
In fact, coffee has long been a source of inspiration and creativity. First brewed in the dark, smoky interiors of 17th-century coffee shops and cafes, coffee gave birth to ideas like the ballot box, tipping, and the New York Stock Exchange. Even the American Revolution was first brewed in the revolutionary talk of a coffee shop. In France a poor artillery officer, called NapoleonBonaparte, had to leave his three-cornered hat in a Paris cafe to guarantee unpaid coffee bills.
Today, in the US, each person will guzzle an average of seventeen gallons of coffee a year--making Americans some of the keenest coffee drinkers in the world. Whether it's instant or filter, sitting in or on the move, the small green bean--with its little kick of caffeine--is part of everyday life.
THE HISTORY OF COFFEE
Africa gave the world coffee. It grows wild even now in central Africa, and especially in Ethiopia, where people still prepare and drink coffee in a time-honored social ritual.
The first coffee wasn't roasted, ground or probably even drunk. Instead, people just chewed the cherries and green beans of wild coffee trees for the stimulant effect of the caffeine.
Coffee only became a drink sometime in the sixth century. People in parts of Ethiopia began making a wine fermented from the pulp of the coffee tree's fruit or cherrie. Coffee's name originates from this wine, or "qahwah" in Arabic.
At first, coffee spread through Muslim and Christian monasteries, and along the Arab trade routes from Ethiopia and Sudan into Arabia, including what is now Yemen.
THE FIRST COFFEE HOUSES. Coffee drinking spread first to Mecca, and then on to Constantinople (now Istanbul) in Turkey, and Damascus in Syria. It was here that the first coffee houses sprang up. They were places of gefort, with neat couches, where men played chess and tric trac. In the early 1500s in Cairo, Muslim dervishes were drinking coffee as part of their frenetic nighttime worship.
Coffee began to reach Europe around 1600. First the Italians, then the Dutch, Germans and English fell under the spell of the new drink. In the Italian city of Venice coffee, first regarded as medicine, began to replace fruit juices, cider, wines and teas made from various plants. The upper classes, the merchants, and professionals all gathered in the new coffee houses or "cafes," to be joined later in the evenings by women.
In England, the first written reference to coffee drinking is in 1635, at Balliol College, Oxford. Coffee became quickly associated with good living, discussion, and thought.
The first coffee house in England opened in Oxford in 1650. Two years later, a wealthy London merchant brought home a stock of beans and a Greek servant called Pasqua Rosee to roast and brew them. He quickly found himself flooded with curious visitors, all anxious to be offered coffee. Partly to get rid of the unwanted numbers of people geing to his house, he allowed Rosee, along with his coachman, to sell the coffee to the public. Soon there were over three thousand coffee houses in the City of London. Even the plague of 1665 didn't close them, and many coffee houses continued in business, though new arrivals were often closely questioned about the health of their families before they were allowed in.
Coffee houses in England quickly became established as men's meeting places but they were not the luxurious places known in the Middle East. One contemporary visitor to a London coffee house describes the entrance of one as "so dark you could stumble." He describes how the air inside was thick with tobacco and the smoke of open fires. Coffee was brewed on a large pot bubbling on the fire. On the walls were copies of government notices, including an ordinance against drinking and bad language.
GROWING COFFEE: Two species dominate the world of coffee--arabica and robusta--though in the wild there are around fifty different varieties, with probably others yet to be found. They include some coffees that are naturally decaffeinated and others like liberica, grown in West Africa, that are sold mainly in home markets.
BLENDING AND ROASTING: The first coffee was served in bowls--much like the first tea--and it was always black, at least until the Dutch began adding milk in the 1660s.
Coffee was sold ready-brewed in coffee shops, or by street vendors who carried a barzier and coffee equipment with them. In some ways little has changed; the coffee shop in its various forms, and the expresso cart, are still features of every city in nearly every coffee-drinking country in the world.
Mos of the coffee we drink is a blend. Often the consistent taste of a blend is achieved iwth beans from any number of countries, and species of plant. The big blends aim to taste the same, whatever beans gee to market. Often cheaper, low quality robusta beans, farmed on a larger scale and picked less selectively, are used to bulk out a blend. Other better-quality arabica beans are used to add flavor, body and the desired snap of acidity.
Roasting is a critical stage in coffee production--it defines what the final coffee will taste like. Most coffee is now raosted in bulk in what is basically a rotating drum that heats the beans. The roast time can vary from a few minutes to half an hour. The beans undergo geplex chemical changes during roasting--and the final taste and feel of coffee when it's drunk is due to around two hundred different gepounds which develop during the process.
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