coffee
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The coffee plant Coffea arabica is a small tree, but is pruned into a large bush to make harvesting easier. It produces sweet-smelling white flowers; these are followed by green berries which turn red when ripe. Each berry contains two seeds, which are processed to make coffee for drinking.
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A contemporary picture of a coffee house from about 1700. Coffee, chocolate, and tea were all introduced to England in the mid-17th century, and coffee houses rapidly became popular meeting places for the discussion of business affairs and literature.
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Coffee beans ripening in the Blue Mountains, Jamaica. Coffee was first imported to Jamaica in 1728 and rapidly gained importance as a cash crop. The unique soil of the Blue Mountains region produces a quality of coffee which has gained a reputation among connoisseurs as one of the best in the world.
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Central Valley coffee region of Costa Rica, Central America. Most of Costa Rica's coffee is grown here; the climate, altitude, and soil type combine to create the optimal conditions for coffee production.
Drink made from the roasted and ground beanlike seeds found inside the red berries of any of several species of shrubs, originally native to Ethiopia and now cultivated throughout the tropics. It contains a stimulant, caffeine. (Genus Coffea, family Rubiaceae.)
Cultivation
The shrub, naturally about 5 m/17 ft high, is pruned to about 2 m/7 ft; it is fully fruit-bearing in 5 or 6 years, and lasts for 30 years. Coffee grows best on frost-free hillsides with moderate rainfall. The world's largest producers are Brazil, Colombia, and Côte d'Ivoire; others include Indonesia (Java), Ethiopia, India, Hawaii, and Jamaica. The Association of Coffee Producing Countries (ACPC) was founded in 1993 to represent its 28 members, of whom the 14 ratified members produce over 60% of world coffee supply. Since the 1990s the world coffee market has suffered from over-supply, and in September 2001 the price of coffee sank to its lowest level in three decades as the ACPC scrapped a failed buffer-stock scheme. Tens of thousands of labourers were laid off in Latin America as coffee prices fell below production costs.History
Coffee drinking began in Arab regions in the 14th century but did not become common in Europe until three hundred years later, when the first coffee houses were opened in Vienna, and soon after in Paris and London. In the American colonies, coffee became the substitute for tea when tea was taxed by the British.| After the USA became an independent nation, coffee remained the national drink and is so popular that ‘coffee breaks’ are negotiated into work contracts. Coffee is usually drunk hot, black or with cream and sugar; it is also drunk cold as iced coffee, especially in summer. |
| In 2004 the first commercially viable, naturally decaffeinated coffee-producing plants were found by Brazilian researchers. After breeding 3,000 Ethiopian coffee plants with the aim of producing low-caffeine strains of coffee beans, the researchers found that three coffee-producing shrubs, derived from the Caffea arabica species, produced beans that were naturally decaffeinated, possessing only one-fifteenth of the caffeine content of commercial coffee-producing plants. |
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