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--------------------- 2437 - COFFEE - my morning coffee
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- Your morning coffee started with a goat. Yep. Way back in 900 A.D. in Ethiopia a herdsman noticed his goat was unusually alert and a little jittery. He also noticed that the goat was eating some red berries off a bush. He tried a few berries himself. Sure enough the herdsman and the goat were soon jumping around together.
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- The Arabs were the ones to discover, in 1400 A.D., that it was not the berry but the seed inside that was so invigorating. And, medieval Arabs were the first to consume a coffee beverage. They separated the bean from the pulp and skin, crushed it, and mixed it with water to make a drink called qahwa or, in Turkish, kahveh.
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- The Arabs learned how to roast the beans and controlled the trade of coffee beans fighting to maintain the monopoly. You could be put to death for smuggling a coffee plant.
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- But word of the "wine of Araby" spread. At first, Europeans were suspicious. Many called it the "bitter invention of Satan," and priests urged parishioners to resist drinking in the sin. It wasn't until Pope Clement VIII tasted coffee in 1600, and gave it a thumbs-up, that coffee began to lose the taint of being evil to being good to the last drop.
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- By 1700, hundreds of coffeehouses graced Europe, and the Dutch had broken the Arab monopoly on the coffee trade, smuggling seedlings to the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra.
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- Not long after, the king of France received a coffee plant as a gift from the mayor of Amsterdam, and a seedling from that plant, taken to Martinique around 1720, gave rise to the coffee of Central and South America.
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- Looking for a way to make his coffee faster, in 1901 an Italian named Luigi Bezzera patented a machine that forced steam through the grounds, and espresso was born.
Espresso was much stronger coffee. And when coffee pioneers used excess steam to warm milk before mixing it with their coffee, they discovered that steamed milk is frothy, foamy, and has a pleasant flavor all its own leading to lattes and cappuccinos.
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- Today, humans down more than 500,000,000,000 cups of coffee every year. That is why I own stock in Starbucks.
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- August 22, 2019. 791
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--------------------- Thursday, August 22, 2019 -------------------------
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