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Monday, February 2, 2009

Know The Importance Of Coffee

By John Purkis

Coffee originated on the plateaus of central Ethiopia. By A.D. 1000, Ethiopian Arabs were collecting the fruit of the tree, which grew wild, and preparing a beverage from its beans. During the fifteenth century traders Trans planted wild coffee trees from Africa to southern Arabia. The eastern Arabs, the first to cultivate coffee, soon adopted the Ethiopian Arabs' practice of making a hot beverage from its ground, roasted beans.

The Arabs' fondness for the drink spread rapidly along trade routes, and Venetians had been introduced to coffee by 1600. In Europe as in Arabia, church and state officials frequently proscribed the new drink, identifying it with the often-liberal discussions conducted by coffee house habitus, but the institutions nonetheless prolifolited nowhere more so than in seventeenth-century London. The first coffee house opened there in 1652, and a large number of such establishments (caf; s) opened soon after on both the European continent (caf derives from the French term for coffee) and in North America, where they appeared in such Eastern cities as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia in the last decade of the seventeenth century.

Many of these compounds, like chlorogenic acids, will be destroyed by the roasting process, and many, will be oxidized to form new compounds not listed above. Most of these, like the phenolics at the top, are responsible for the aroma of the coffee, while others, like thexanthin derivatives give coffee its stimulant qualities. Coffee plants belong to the botanical genus Coffea in the family Rubiaceae, which has 500 genera and over 6,000 species. Although there is some disagreement, the number of species belonging to Coffea ranges from 25 to 100. Most commercial green coffee is either the C. Arabica or C. canephora species, which is referred to commercially as Arabica and Robusta, respectively. Coffea Arabica is an allotetraploid inbreeder (2n = 44). Forty to fifty cultivars (infraspecific taxa) are known, and are suspected to be derived from two cultivars of C. Arabica being var. arabica (including var. typica) and var. bourbon.

Coffee berries and their seeds undergo several processes before they become the familiar roasted coffee. First, coffee berries are picked, generally by hand. Then they are sorted by ripeness and color and the flesh of the berry is removed, usually by machine, and the seeds-usually called beans-are fermented to remove the slimy layer of musiclag still present on the bean. When the fermentation is finished, the beans are washed with large quantities of fresh water to remove the fermentation residue, which generates massive amounts of highly polluted coffee west water. Finally, the seeds are dried, sorted, and labeled as green coffee beans. A traditional way to let the coffee beans dry is to let them sit on a cement patio and rake over the beans till dry. Although some companies just use cylinders to pump in heated air and that will dry off the coffee beans.

At present, 85 percent of Americans begin their day by making some form of the drink, and the average American will consume three cups of it over the course of the day.

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