Filtered Facts

The Coffee

Interesting facts about coffee (well, most of them are true).

Coffee grows on a coffee tree! The coffea plant is a genus of the Rubiaceae family. The two species from which most commercial coffee comes are the coffee arabica and the coffee canephora — usually called robusta. Other species are coffee liberica and coffee dewevrei — both taste very ordinary!
The stimulating effects of coffee were discovered in Ethiopia around 1100BC. According to legend, a goat herder noticed that his goats became friskier than usual after consuming the red cherries of a wild shrub. Curious, he tasted the cherries himself. He was delighted by the cherries’ invigorating effects — after all, the days of herding must have been long and tiring — and shared this magical discovery with the world.
Coffee travelled from Ethiopia to Arabia sometime between AD575 and AD580. Italy was the first European country to import coffee commercially.
Coffee came to… Italy in the early-1600s, France in 1644, Germany in 1675, Austria in the mid-1600s, Great Britain in 1637, Netherlands in 1665, North America in 1688, Scandinavia in the 1680s and Australia — probably 1788.
It takes around six years for a coffee tree to produce its first coffee cherries. The beans themselves are the stones of the coffee cherries. Each red coffee cherry contains two coffee beans.
Robusta, while not as flavoursome as arabica beans, does contain a greater amount of caffeine.
Coffee ‘blossoms’ are similar to jasmine blossoms in look and smell.
The word ‘coffee’ originates from the Arabic word ‘kaweh’, meaning strength or vigour.
By the 9th Century, coffee was widely drunk in Persia. It was widespread throughout the Muslim world by the 15th Century.
The Dutch began growing coffee on the island of Java, now part of Indonesia, in 1696.
Bach composed the Coffee Cantata in honour of the drink. Beethoven was also an avid coffee drinker, preferring a blend made from 60 beans per cup.
By 1800, Brazil had become the largest producer of coffee in the world.
Honor de Balzac (1799-1850), the French literary Realist, would fuel his writing with upwards of 60 cups of coffee a day.
Coffee reached Europe early in the 17th Century. Louis XIV and Pope Clement III were early converts to the beverage. The first coffee-house in England opened in Oxford, in 1650, and in London one year later. By 1700, there were some 2000 coffee-houses in the capital.
In the 1700s, a French naval officer, Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu, stole a cutting from the King’s coffee tree, in the Jardin des Plantes, in Paris, and took it to the Caribbean island of Martinique. Fifty years later, there were an estimated 18 million coffee trees there.