COFFEE KLATCH

BREW BASICS

Coffee is the most popular beverage worldwide with more than 400 billion cups consumed each year. Coffee is grown commercially in more than 45 countries throughout the world—all of which lie along the equator between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.
Coffee, along with beer and peanut butter, is on a list of the “ten most recognizable odors.” As a world commodity, it is second only to oil.
In 1727, using seedlings smuggled from Paris, coffee plants were first cultivated in Brazil. Brazil is now by far the world’s largest producer of coffee, accounting for almost one-third of the world’s coffee production and producing more than 3.33 billion pounds of coffee each year. More than 5 million people in Brazil are employed by the coffee trade.
The most widely accepted legend associated with the discovery of coffee is of the goat herder named Kaldi of Ethiopia. Around the year AD 800-850, Kaldi was amazed as he noticed his goats behaving in a frisky manner after eating the leaves and berries of a coffee shrub, and decided he had to try them himself.
The Arabs are generally believed to have been the first to brew coffee. The first commercially grown and harvested coffee originated in the Arabian Peninsula near the port of Mocha. Turkey began to roast and grind the coffee bean in the thirteenth century and, by the sixteenth century the country had become the chief distributor of coffee, with markets established in Egypt, Syria, Persia, and Venice. Coffee was first known in Europe as Arabian wine.
In the sixteenth century, Turkish women could divorce their husbands if the man failed to keep his family’s pot filled with coffee.
Beethoven was a coffee lover, and so particular about his coffee that he always counted 60 beans for each cup when he prepared his brew.
French philosopher Voltaire reportedly drank 50 cups of coffee a day.
The first coffee mill appeared in London during the seventeenth century.
Coffee as a medicine reached its highest and lowest point in the seventeenth century in England. Wild medical contraptions to administer a mixture of coffee and an assortment of heated butter, honey, and oil became treatments for the sick. Advertisements for coffee in London in 1657 claimed that the beverage was a cure for scurvy, gout, and other ills.
The first Parisian café opened in 1689 to serve coffee. Before the rise of coffeehouses, coffee was sold by street vendors in Europe in the Arab fashion, the forerunners of the pavement espresso carts of today.
In 1763 there were more than 200 coffee shops in Venice. Italy now has more than 200,000 coffee bars.
Until the eighteenth century, coffee was almost always boiled.
The drip pot was invented by a Frenchman around 1800.
By 1850 the manual coffee grinder had found its way to most upper-middle-class kitchens of the Western world.
The first commercial espresso machine was manufactured in Italy in 1906.
The coffee filter was invented in 1908 by Melitta Benz, a German homemaker, when she lined a tin cup with blotter paper to filter the coffee grinds.
In Italy, espresso is considered so essential to daily life that if it is consumed at the bar, the price is regulated by the government. Italians do not usually drink espresso during meals.
The average age of an Italian barista is 48 years old. A barista is a respected job title in Italy.
Australians consume 60 percent more coffee than tea, a sixfold increase since 1940.
In Japan, coffee shops are called kissaten. More than 10,000 coffee shops plus several thousand vending machines with both hot and cold coffee serve the needs of Tokyo alone. The official Coffee Day in Japan is October 1. Japan ranks third in the world in coffee consumption.
Scandinavia has the world’s highest per capita annual coffee consumption, 26.4 pounds. Italy has an annual consumption per capita of only 10 pounds.
In Sumatra, workers on coffee plantations gather the world’s most expensive coffee by following a gourmet marsupial who consumes only the choicest coffee beans. By picking through what he excretes, they obtain the world’s most expensive coffee—Kopi Luwak, which sells for more than $100 per pound.
Raw coffee beans, soaked in water and spices, are chewed like sweets in many parts of Africa.
053THE NATIONAL DRINK
Coffee represents 75 percent of all the caffeine consumed in the United States. Fifty-two percent of Americans drink coffee. The United States is the world’s largest consumer of coffee, importing 16 to 20 million bags annually (2.5 million pounds), representing one-third of all coffee exported. The typical coffee drinker has 3.4 cups of coffee per day. That translates into more than 450 million cups of coffee daily. The average annual coffee consumption of an American adult is 26.7 gallons, or more than 400 cups.
 
 
In 1670, Dorothy Jones of Boston was granted a license to sell coffee, and so became the first American coffee trader.
 
 
William Penn purchased a pound of coffee in New York in 1683 for $4.68.
 
 
The heavy tea tax imposed on the colonies in 1773, which led to the Boston Tea Party, resulted in America switching from tea to coffee.
 
 
In 1790 there were two coffee firsts in the United States: the first wholesale coffee roasting company, and the first newspaper advertisement featuring coffee.
 
 
During the Civil War, Union soldiers were issued 8 pounds of ground roasted coffee as part of their personal ration of 100 pounds of food.
 
 
In the early 1900s, coffee was often delivered door-to-door in the United States, by horse-pulled wagons.
During World War II, the government used 260 million pounds of instant coffee.
 
In 1990, more than 4 billion dollars’ worth of coffee was imported into the United States.
 
 
The largest coffee import center in the United States is located in the city of New Orleans.
 
Hawaii features an annual Kona Festival, a coffee-picking contest. Each year the winner becomes a state celebrity. Hawaii is the only state of the United States in which coffee is commercially grown, and the coffee is harvested between November and April.

FEELING CAFFEINATED

There are about 30 milligrams of caffeine in the average chocolate bar, while a cup of coffee contains around 100 to 150.
Caffeine is on the International Olympic Committee list of prohibited substances. Athletes who test positive for more than 12 micrograms of caffeine per milliliter of urine may be banned from the Olympic Games. This level may be reached after drinking about five cups of coffee.
Special studies conducted about the human body reveal it will usually absorb up to about 300 milligrams of caffeine at a given time—about four normal cups. Additional amounts are just cast off, providing no further stimulation. The human body dissipates 20 percent of the caffeine in the system each hour.
Espresso vendors report an increase in decaffeinated sales in the month of January due to New Year’s resolutions to decrease caffeine intake.
054A HEALTHY HABIT?
A scientific report from the University of California found that the steam rising from a cup of coffee contains the same amounts of antioxidants as three oranges. The antioxidants are heterocyclic compounds that prevent cancer and heart disease.
 
Regular coffee drinkers have about one-third less asthma symptoms than non-coffee drinkers do, according to a Harvard researcher who studied 20,000 people.
 
Large doses of coffee can be lethal. Ten grams, or 100 cups over four hours, can kill the average human.

THE DAILY GRIND

Coffee is graded according to three criteria: bean quality (altitude and species), quality of preparation, and size of bean.
When a coffee seed is planted, it takes about five years to yield consumable fruit.
Coffee trees are self-pollinating.
The arabica is the original coffee plant, which still grows wild in Ethiopia. The arabica coffee tree is an evergreen, and in the wild will grow to a height between 14 and 20 feet. Coffee trees are normally pruned to around 8 feet in order to facilitate harvesting.
Coffee trees produce highly aromatic, short-lived flowers generating a scent between jasmine and orange. These blossoms produce cranberry-size coffee cherries. It takes four to five years to yield a commercial harvest. Thereafter, the tree produces consistently for 15 or 20 years.
An acre of coffee trees can produce up to 10,000 pounds of coffee cherries. That amounts to approximately 2,000 pounds of beans after hulling or milling. An arabica coffee tree can produce up to 12 pounds of coffee a year, depending on soil and climate.
The 2,000 arabica coffee cherries it takes to make a roasted pound of coffee are normally picked by hand as they ripen. Since each cherry contains two beans, it takes about 4,000 arabica beans to make a pound of roasted coffee.
Only about 20 percent of harvested coffee beans are considered to be a premium bean of the highest quality.
Coffee sacks are usually made of hemp and weigh approximately 132 pounds when they are full of green coffee beans. It takes more than 600,000 beans to fill a coffee sack.
Coffee beans are similar to grapes that produce wine in that they are affected by the temperature, soil conditions, altitude, rainfall, drainage, and degree of ripeness when picked.
After decaffeinating coffee, processing companies no longer throw the caffeine away; they sell it to pharmaceutical companies.
Before roasting, some green coffee beans are stored for years, and experts believe that certain beans improve with age when stored properly.
Until the late nineteenth century, people roasted their coffee at home using popcorn poppers and stove-top frying pans.
Coffee is generally roasted between 400°F and 425°F. The longer it is roasted, the darker the roast. Roasting time is usually 10 to 20 minutes. Dark-roasted coffees actually have less caffeine than medium roasts. The longer a coffee is roasted, the more caffeine burns off during the process.
Overroasted coffee beans are very flammable during the roasting process.
After coffee beans are roasted, and when they begin to cool, they release about 700 chemical substances that make up the vaporizing aromas.

FLAVOR PROFILES

The aroma and flavor derived from coffee is a result of the little beads of the oily substance called coffee essence, or coffee oil. This is not actual oil since it dissolves in water.
Roasted coffee beans start to lose small amounts of flavor within two weeks. Ground coffee begins to lose its flavor in one hour. Brewed coffee and espresso begins to lose flavor within minutes.
Finely grinding coffee beans and boiling them in water is still known as “Turkish coffee.” It is still made this way today in Turkey and Greece. An old Turkish proverb says, “Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death, and as sweet as love.”
Commercially flavored coffee beans are flavored with special oils after they are roasted and partially cooled to around 100 degrees, when the coffee beans’ pores are open and therefore more receptive to flavor absorption.
Irish cream and hazelnut are the most popular whole bean coffee flavorings.
Frederick the Great had his coffee made with champagne and a bit of mustard.
Milk as an additive to coffee became popular in the 1680s, when a French physician recommended that café au lait be used for medicinal purposes.
Adding sugar to coffee is believed to have started in 1715, in the court of Louis XIV.
Iced coffee in a can has been popular in Japan since 1945.
The Europeans first added chocolate to their coffee in the seventeenth century.
Citrus has been added to coffee for several hundred years.
Dandelion root can be roasted and ground as a coffee substitute.
To make espresso sweet, use granulated sugar, which dissolves more quickly, rather than sugar cubes; white sugar rather than brown sugar; and real sugar rather than sweeteners, which alter the taste of coffee.
Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee is one of the most expensive and sought-after coffees in the world.
The word “cappuccino” has several derivations, the original of which began in the sixteenth century. The Capuchin order of friars, established after 1525, played an important role in bringing Catholicism back to Reformation Europe. Its Italian name came from the long pointed cowl, or cappuccino, “hood,” that was worn as part of the order’s habit. The French version of cappuccino was capuchin , from which came the English Capuchin. In Italian, cappuccino went on to describe espresso coffee mixed or topped with steamed milk or cream, so called because the color of the coffee resembled the color of the habit of a Capuchin friar. The first use of cappuccino in English is recorded in 1948 in a work about San Francisco. There is also the story that says that the term comes from the fact that the coffee is dark, like the monk’s robe, and the cap is likened to the color of the monk’s head.