By any other name, Coffee!

 Mmm! Coffee. A most satisfying, uplifting drink.

In previous blogs I talked about the discovery of coffee and several attempts to ban it. We looked at Coffeehouses throughout history and current day. But what about Coffee, the drink itself. What has brought us to our current plethora of coffee blends and drink variations that has made coffee the 2^nd most traded commodity on earth. To start let’s look at a few milestones in the history of coffee.

1000 First known literature describing Coffee.

1100 First Coffee plantations established in Yemen with coffee from Ethiopia.

1200 Turkey becomes the first place where coffee beans are roasted.

1438 A spice grinder is invented, which is used to grind roasted coffee beans

1600 Arabia & Muslim Africa Monopolize Coffee, however, Bada Budan smuggles fertile beans back to India breaking the Arab monopoly on coffee production.

1668 Little known factoid. Coffee overtakes beer as New York City’s favourite beverage for breakfast.

1727 Brazil decides Coffee is in their future. Colonel Francisco de Melo Palheta steals fertile coffee beans from the Dutch. From these stolen beans grew the world’s largest coffee empire.  

1818 Laurens, a Parisian metalsmith invents the first coffee percolator

1822 Louis Bernard Rabaut of France develops the world’s first espresso machine.

1864 Jabez Burns invents the original Burns coffee roaster.

1886 Joel Cheek names his new coffee blend “Maxwell House" after the Maxwell House Hotel in Nashville where Theodore Roosevelts’ comment that this delightful coffee was “Good to the Last Drop” launched the advertising slogan that was used to promote America’s first blended coffee. 

1901 Satori Kato, a Japanese American chemist in Chicago, invents Instant Coffee

1903 Decaffeinated Coffee Developed. Ludwig Roselius, then markets the coffee under the brand name Sanka.

1908 Melitta Bentz a housewife in Germany, produces the first drip coffee maker. Later the same year she founded the Melitta Bentz

1933 Italian Dr. Ernest Illy created the first Automatic espresso machine.

1938 Freeze Dried coffee invented. The Nestle Company develops the freeze-dried Nescafe instant coffee at the request of the Brazilian Government.

1946 Italian Achilles Gaggia creates a commercial piston espresso machine that uses a piston to generate high pressure.

1963 An automatic drip coffee maker is introduced by the Bunn corporation for use in restaurants. The machine heats the water, brews the coffee and keeps it warm on a heated plate.

2010 Cold Brew Coffee becomes popular in North America. However, its actual origan dates beck to the 1600’s in Kyoto Japan  

 Coming next, Coffee types, beverages and some interesting facts!