From the morning espresso ritual to coffee breaks to an after-dinner coffee, the sector has been in a dedicated relationship with their cuppa Joe for hundreds of years.
There’s a lot to study about the amazing brew, from how it’s made to how we drink it. In her documentary, The Coffee Chronicles, contributing producer Marilyn Powell shares the history, technological know-how, and subculture at the back of the arena’s most popular drink.
Here are ten pieces of information about espresso to pour…Er, pore over:
Robusta vs. Arabica
There are 124 species of coffee. However, the best two—Robusta and Arabica—are consumed nowadays. Robusta is robust and hardy. However, Arabica has a sweeter, softer taste. In 1756, the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus dubbed it Coffea arabica (coffee from Arabia), but Linnaeus was wrong. Coffea arabica is indigenous to Ethiopia, where it still grows.
Legendary origins
According to legend, an Ethiopian goatherd named Kaldi made a startling discovery. One day, his goats wandered off. When Kaldi found them, they seemed to be “dancing” once they’d been nibbling on bright, red berries, known as coffee cherries. So he delivered some to expose a Sufi monk, who threw them into the fireplace. Soon, a tantalizing aroma started to fill the room. The beans in the cherries were roasting inside the flames. Then, the opposite monks collected the beans from the embers and the floor and brewed them, making the authentic espresso drink.
Border crossings
No one knows precisely when, but centuries ago, espresso seeds were carried from Ethiopia to Yemen, where the seeds were planted. The Yemenis began cultivating Arabica coffee for the first time. By the 16th century, ingesting it had spread throughout the Muslim world. By the seventeenth century, Europeans were consuming it too.
Out of Africa
In the 18th century, the Dutch and French planted coffee in Indonesia, the Caribbean, and Latin America. By the nineteenth century, the British cultivated it in India and Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. Two-thirds of the sector’s coffee manufacturing nowadays is in Arabica.
One lump or?
Sugar — and milk — had been introduced to espresso in seventeenth-century Europe to mood the sour taste. That’s how the café au lait was created. Wildcat coffee. One of the most coveted coffee varieties comes from the feces of the Asian palm civet, a wild cat-like creature.
In the 19th century, in Indonesia, the practice of feeding coffee cherries to caged civets started. As they cannot digest the beans, they excrete them entirely. The espresso made from the beans is said to be an easy, much less acidic brew. However, the process of manufacturing kopi luwak, “civet coffee,” has been condemned by animal welfare activists.
Elephant coffee
Blake Dinkin, who was heard in this Ideas documentary, produces his Blake Ivory espresso using elephants in Thailand. He feeds coffee cherries to elephants and can pay their proprietors to collect intact cherries from the elephants’ dung. The espresso that results is stated to enjoy the fermentation of the cherries within the elephants’ digestive tracts. Protein breaks down, lowers bitterness, and sugars are released from the fruit into the espresso bean.
