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by Jessica Wilson
Coffee, java, joe. No matter what you call it, coffee is a staple of many people’s lives. Despite that, most people don’t know that their daily cup of coffee doesn’t just come from the big silver machine at the corner Starbucks.
Coffee was first discovered in the ninth century in the Ethiopian Highlands. Legend has it that a goat herder named Kaldi discovered coffee after his goats wouldn’t sleep after eating the berries off what is now known as the coffee bush. Kaldi took the berries to a local monastery where the monks used them to make a drink that helped them stay up for their late-night prayers.
Coffee spread to Turkey and northern Africa in the fifteenth century. The drink then spread to Europe before making its way to the Americas in the 1700s. Coffee drinks really became popular in the United States following the boom of coffee houses in Seattle.
Coffee is made from the beans inside the berries of the small evergreen coffee bush. The berries are picked, processed and dried before the seeds are removed and roasted.
The two most common types of coffee beans are arabica and robusta. Arabica is the more popular of the two and represents about 70 percent of the coffee that is consumed in the world. Arabica is considered more suitable for drinking because it has a nice, mild flavor. The arabica bush is found in Ethiopia and Yemen and can be difficult to cultivate.
Robusta is a more bitter bean and has less flavor than arabica. It is still very popular, in part due to the fact that it contains about 40 to 50 percent more caffeine than arabica. Robusta is grown in central and western Africa and parts of southeast Asia. The beans are smaller and more round than arabica, but the robusta tree is more hardy and easier to cultivate.
Coffee is still an important export for many countries. Brazil is the world’s leader in coffee production, followed by Vietnam and Indonesia. Coffee isn’t a common crop in the main land United States, but it is grown in Hawaii. The enormously popular Kona coffee is grown along the slope of the Mauna Loa volcano.
Coffee isn’t just coffee these days. There are dozens of different kinds — from American roast to instant. American or regular roast is a medium-roasted coffee, while French roast is a heavily-roasted bean that produces a stronger coffee. Italian roast is most often used to make espresso because of its strong flavor. European roast and Viennese roast are both combinations of regular and heavily-roasted beans. There’s also instant coffee, a powder made from heat-dried coffee.
The caffeine content in different types of coffee varies greatly. Decaffeinated instant coffee has about three millimeters of caffeine, while drip, filtered coffee can have as much as 175 milliliters.
These days, there’s not just regular coffee. In addition to the numerous roasts, there are dozens of types of coffee drinks: Espresso is a strong, dark-roast drink that is often the base for other drinks, such as the cappuccino mixture of espresso, steamed milk and foam; the espresso-water mixture of an Americano; and the café latte which is made with a single shot of espresso and three parts of steamed milk. There’s also the coffee-milk combination known as café au lait, and cafe mocha, which is a cappuccino with chocolate syrup added to it.
The types of coffee drinks are endless when you mix in flavor shots, milk and sweeteners. And as a topper to our story about hot coffee drinks — cold coffee! There’s the cold frappuccino, café freddo, simple iced coffee . . .
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