Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Coffee


 

Early History

Without it many people cannot wake up and stay awake all day. Hot, cold, black, white, latte, or cappuccino, all mean the same thing, coffee. It has become a more popular drink than water.  Coffee shops, like Starbucks, Costa and Café du Roi, are all over the world.  Actually, there are more than 400 million cups drunk each year.  (http://www.essortment.com/history-coffee-41731.html) 

However, the early history of this famous drink is not clear.  A legend said that the first coffee plant was found in Ethiopia. A goat farmer said that his goats were very wild after eating a berry.  Religious leaders took that berry (the coffee berry) and made a drink of it.  After they drank the drink they stayed awake all night to pray.  From Ethiopia, the coffee berry made it to Arabia where coffee, the drink we know today, got born. Travelling from Mecca and Medina, coffee spread to Egypt, Persia (Iran) and Syria.  And during periods of Muslim expansion between the 11th and 16th centuries, coffee appeared in Turkey, the Balkans, Spain, and North Africa.  (http://chilipaper.com/FNCC/history_of_coffee.htm)

 

Bibliography


“The History of Coffee”, http://chilipaper.com/FNCC/history_of_coffee.html
 

Development

By the 1600s coffee spread to Europe beginning in Venice, then spreading to Austria, France, Germany, and Holland.  In 1652, the first coffee house was opened in England. (http://www.essortment.com/history-coffee-41731.html)  Coffee houses popular everywhere because men loved going there to smoke tobacco, and play chess.  Soon after, coffee spread to America.  All over the world people were drinking coffee just like the Arabs in the Middle East. So coffee made too much money for the Arabs. The Arabs wanted to keep safe the coffee so they guarded the coffee trade.  Foreigners could not visit coffee farms, and no one could take a coffee plant to another country. (http://chilipaper.com/FNCC/history_of_coffee.htm)  However, plants did make it out of Arabia; plants traveled to Java, Indonesia, Central, and South America. (http://www.ico.org/coffee_story.asp) 

Coffee was now everywhere and everyone drinking it. The problem was that too many people were growing coffee.  When was are too many growers of coffee, the prices go down.  This means small farmers can’t survive with no money.  In this time, the coffee growers in America, Guatemala, Mexico, El Salvador and Colombia, grew fast.  Also as the United States became a big country, the demand for coffee grew at the same time. (http://www.ico.org/coffee_story.asp)

 
Today

The coffee culture in the USA grew faster and became the leader developing the taste for coffee. From the 1970s, coffee houses like Starbucks and Seattle’s Best grew very fast.  These and other coffee shops moved all over Europe in places like Italy, Germany and Scandinavia. They are now found in every country in the world.  We can find these shops in all cities like, London, Tokyo, Dubai and Bangkok.

Today, coffee farms are all over the world.  Central and South America produce more coffee than any other area and Brazil is the coffee capital of the world. (http://www.essortment.com/history-coffee-41731.html) Coffee is the world's most popular beverage. We consume 400 billion cups each year, nearly 400 million cups a day. (http://www.gocoffeego.com/professor-peaberry/history-of-coffee/1900) The importance of coffee to the world is proved by it being second in value only to oil as a source of foreign exchange to producing countries. (http://www.ico.org/coffee_story.asp)  So the coffee berry that the Ethiopians found the goats eating has changed into something very different.  The Arabic way of boiling the bean to make a drink changed in many ways.  However, the coffee we drink today is still the same drink they had in Mecca.  So we should all thank the Arabs for creating coffee, the drink, and the Americans for making it better and spreading it around the world.

Bibliography





“The Story of Coffee”, http://www.ico.org/coffee_story.asp

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