Archive for the ‘Coffee 101’ Category
A brief History of Coffee
As beverages go coffee in it’s present form has only been around for about six centuries, while tea and wine go back several thousand years. The tradition of flavoring and sweetening coffee goes back to the era when coffee was first drunk in the Middle East and Europe, for instance Cafe au Vin, a recipe of which dared to blend port wine and french roast coffee was one of the ways in which coffee was first savored. At the time, the only sweetener used was Cardamon. Cardamon comes from the seeds of a ginger-like plant which imparts it’s sweet, spicy flavor to the coffee. The original Arabic word for coffee was in fact the same word used for wine ” Qahwah”. Cafe au Vin brings out the fruity complexity of the coffee and the coffee adds a full bodied yet silken texture to the amazing taste.
In Vienna, coffee’s first stop in Europe, shopkeepers served complex coffee drinks which included steamed milk, whipped cream, cinnamon, vanilla, and chocolate. Which gives us the present day incarnations of our espresso based drinks.
Do you really know your coffee?
A coffee bean is the seed of the coffee plant (the pit inside the red or purple fruit). The fruits, coffee cherries or coffee berries, most commonly contain two stones with their flat sides together. Coffee beans consist mostly of endosperm that contains 0.8 – 2.5 % caffeine, which is one of the main reasons the plants are cultivated. As coffee is one of the world’s most widely consumed beverages, coffee beans are a major cash crop, and an important export product for some countries.
Species of coffee plant include Coffea arabica, Coffea benghalensis, Coffea canephora, Coffea congensis, Coffea excelsa, Coffea gallienii, Coffea bonnieri, Coffea mogeneti, Coffea liberica, and Coffea stenophylla. The seeds of different species produce coffee with slightly different characteristics.
Coffea arabica accounts for about 75% of the world’s coffee trade, while Coffea canephora (syn. Coffea robusta) is cultivated where Coffea arabica does not thrive, and Coffea liberica and Coffea excelsa are grown in limited areas across the globe. In a crop of coffee, a small percentage of cherries contain a single bean, instead of the usual two. This is called a peaberry.