Louis
XIV of France was a fervent coffee drinker. Owed a favor by the Dutch, they
delivered a coffee tree from Arabia to his chateau in 1714 that was put into Europe's
first greenhouse. This tree eventually beget millions of other coffee trees
and is the parent tree of many of the Central and South American coffee trees.
In
the 1800s, German women worked in the fields less, but were not yet allowed into
the coffeehouses of men. They began meeting amongst themselves at their
houses where they talked and played cards. Thus, coffee played a role in
the movement toward autonomy of women in Germany.
Caffeine
as a substance in coffee was discovered in the late seventeenth century by Dr.
Sylvestre Dufour.
World
War II changed a lot of things throughout the world including the coffee industry.
With increased demand for coffee, large companies emerged using lower quality
beans and drove many smaller roasters out of business as convenience became more
important than quality. It took 20 years for this trend to begin to change
and another 20 years before specialty roasters re-emerged.
Once
upon a time, coffee was thought of as a medicine used both as a stimulant and
a cure for digestive disorders.
In
Germany in the 1700s, coffeehouses were the hangouts of aristocrats who loved
to play a popular card game called ombre. While they played, they
drank their coffee in handleless cups similar to Turkish cups but larger.
At
one point during the 1700s, coffeehouses served as barber shops and gambling houses
as well as places to socialize.
Wine
and lemonade merchants in Italy in the 1600s called coffee "Satan's drink"
due to its threat to their markets. These merchants asked the Pope to issue
an edict condemning coffee. However, their plan backfired when Pope Clement
VII tasted coffee, liked it, and baptized it to make it a Christian drink.
In
mid-19th century Berlin, sugar sculptures by Austrian and Swiss immigrant
artisans were a draw into the coffeehouses of the day.
The
newest coffee producing country is Vietnam.
While
the Venetians were critical to bringing coffee to Europe, it was the Dutch who
brought coffee to the rest of the world including to the island of Java in the
late seventeenth century.
When
coffee was first imported into Europe by the Venetians in the early 1600s, it
was not yet called coffee. Rather it was known as qhaweh, or "the
wine of Arabia."
Coffee
began to be popular in what is now the United States during the mid-1600s in New
York. Within a couple of decades, coffeehouses on the English model began
to flourish as coffee's popularity spread throughout New England too.
The
earliest written comments about coffee were made in the 10th century by Rhazes,
an Arabian physician.
Ludwig
Roselius, a German coffee importer, discovered decaffeinated coffee by accident
in 1903. He tested a sea-water damaged shipment and noted most of the caffeine
was gone from the beans. This prompted him to invent a method of extracting
caffeine from coffee beans, and he named his new product Sanka derived from the
French sans caffeine meaning "without caffeine."
The
first coffeehouses in Constantinople (or Istanbul) opened around 1550 and were
called "schools of wisdom." You could find music, games, or discussions
on poetry, politics and more in these elaborately designed establishments.
Honoré
de Balzac consumed 20-30 cups of coffee each day and believed it genuinely stimulated
ideas for his writings.
The
original iced coffee was a French invention called mazagran made from
cold coffee and seltzer water.
English
coffeehouses of the 1600s were often a home away from home for many men who provided
the address of their favorite coffeehouse as their own.
The
first coffeehouses were not only places for serious conversation, but were also
great game centers that held chess, card and dice tournaments to great audiences.
Costa
Rican coffees are some of the best in the world. However, coffee is not
native to the country. It was imported from Cuba in 1779.
William
Harvey, the man who discovered the circulation of blood in the body, believed
so much in the benefits of coffee consumption that he left over 50 pounds of his
coffee beans to the London College of Physicians.
Johann
Sebastian Bach released his "Coffee Cantata" in 1734 to empathize with
neglected women whose husbands spent considerable time in coffeehouses and in
response to Frederick the Great's attempt to ban coffee in Germany.
Perspective:
When you sip a cup of hot coffee, you continue a tradition of over five centuries.
The
percolator was first invented in 1829. Electric percolators first appeared
in the 1930s.
Musical
entertainment in coffeehouses is not a new phenomenon of recent decades.
The practice dates back more than 300 years to European coffeehouses.
In
the early days of coffeehouses, it was a penny to gain entrance and get a cup
of coffee. Coffeehouses were the places where there was much discussion
of the ideas of the times, and as a result of the penny charge, many coffeehouses
became known as "penny universities."
Ever
wonder where the term "coffee break" originated? These coffee
breaks began in industry during World War II as employers learned that coffee
increased the productivity of their workers. Not only did it increase productivity,
but also the number of marriages according to some studies on the phenomenon.
Before
1800, adding milk of any kind to your coffee was an unheard of event.
In
the beginning of coffee consumption, the berries were eaten, sometimes mixed with
fat to carry on long journeys. At later periods, coffee was also drunk as
a wine and used as a medicine.
The
decaffeination process for coffee was initially developed in the early 1900s.
Today the extracted caffeine is sold by processors to pharmaceutical companies.
The
drip coffeemaker was created 90 years ago when a German housewife named Melitta
Bentz used blotting paper from her son's notebook as a coffee filter.
Two
decades ago nearly 90% of Americans drunk coffee made from percolators.
Percolators are one of the worst ways to make coffee because they continually
boil coffee already made. It was only with the introduction of the cone-shaped
drip units about this time that the quality of a cup of coffee began to change.
The
coffee business has been with us in the United States since the framing of the
Constitution. It was 208 years ago that the first coffee roasting coffee
company was founded and the first coffee ad appeared in a newspaper.
The
coffee plant was first cultivated over 1,300 years ago in Yemen, and the Arabs
are thought to be the first who actually "brewed" coffee. The
word coffee seems to most likely have derived from the Arabic word gahwa
which can mean "wine" or "excitement."
Some
historical perspective: It was just over 325 years ago that the first coffee
cart or kiosk appeared at the St. Germaine Fair in Paris. Soon thereafter
coffee was delivered door-to-door in urns heated by charcoal.
The
first espresso machine was first manufactured about a century ago.
About 80 years ago the coffee table replaced the tea table in many family
living rooms in the United States. For two centuries prior to this, the
tea table standing just over two feet in height was the accepted piece of furniture
in front of the sofa.
Espresso
first became popular in the early 1900s. At that time, espresso could only
be made with a large boiler that built up enough steam to force the water through
the coffee grounds at high pressure. It was 1948 before Giovanni Gaggia
developed a spring-powered piston positioned over the filter holder that could
mechanically push water through coffee grounds at over 100 pounds per square inch.
The
first fully automatic all-in-one roaster/grinder/brewer was invented by the Japanese
in 1991.
The
first espresso machine was invented in France but first manufactured in Italy
about 100 years ago.
The
Melitta® drip coffeemaker was first marketed around 1960 in Germany.
Coffee
houses as a place to socialize became popular in Arabia in the 1400s, moved into
Europe in the 1500s and into North America in the 1600s.
What
was the first year that the word "espresso" appeared in print in the
United States? 1945.
Before
1900, in English the word java meant "nutmeg" (translated literally
from Malay as "land of nutmeg") instead of coffee.
Coffee
as a beverage has taken about 1,000 years to evolve to its current presentation
in specialty coffee shops. The Arabs around 950 A.D. soaked green coffee
beans in cold water to make the first coffee.