Did you know? How to impress your friends with coffee facts!
Coffee is a relative of the gardenia plant family and is thought to be indigenous to the African region which is now the country of Ethiopia.
Arabs were the first to cultivate coffee and the first to make a beverage from the roasted beans around 1300 AD.
Today coffee is grown in more than 70 countries – all in subtropical regions – and more people drink coffee than any other beverage except water and perhaps tea.
The United States consumes more coffee – 300 million cups a day – than any other country, but other countries drink more per capita. The citizens of Finland for example, population five million, drink a total of 20 million cups per day.
Most research shows that drinking coffee has a variety of health benefits and may be good for heart health.
Studies show workers who drank coffee rather than napping were more alert and performed better on the job.
Coffee beans have up to 800 flavor characteristics that our senses can detect. Red wine, by comparison, has 400. Most coffee connoisseurs prefer mild roasts, because the longer a coffee bean is roasted, more characteristics are burned off.
Espresso Coffee has just one-third of the caffeine content of ordinary coffee.
The process of roasting causes coffee beans to begin to release carbon dioxide. When you pour hot water over freshly roasted and ground coffee, as in a French press, you will get a foamy head like that from a dark beer.
A coffee tree lives between 60 and 70 years.
Specialty coffee is surprisingly affordable. One cup costs about 24 cents, making it cheaper than bottled water.
It takes about 5,000 pounds of coffee cherries to produce 1,000 pounds of green coffee beans; the beans lose another 20 percent of their weight in the roasting.