You brew- ty !
CELEBRATE THE HUMBLE COFFEE BEAN
Coffee has been around 1 since the 9th century. Legend has it goat herders noticed the effect of caffeine when the animals appeared to “dance” after munching the fruit of the coffea plant.
A local monk then made a 2 drink with the produce, found it kept him awake at night – and the original cup of offee was born.
Today it is the world’s most 3 popular beverage with around two billion cups consumed daily. In the UK we sup 95million cups a day.
The coffee bean is actually 4 the pip of a coffee cherry. They are called beans due to their shape and are technically seeds that will grow if planted.
The word coffee comes from 5 the Arabic word for wine – “qahwah” which later became “kahveh” in Turkish, and then “koffie” in Dutch, which is where we get the English word.
The largest cup of coffee was 6 more than 11ft tall. Created in Honduras, it contained more than 18,000 litres of coffee, enough for 120,000 normalsized cups. People 7 who drink a moderate amount of coffee – about three
cups a days – tend to live longer. Research has also shown they have a reduced risk of heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and Parkinson’s.
And while high 8 street coffees can be packed with calories – a Starbucks venti vanilla latte comes in at a gut- busting 360 – a single cup of black coffee contains just a single calorie.
A chocolate coffee is 9 called a mocha, originally the name of a port in Yemen. The Yemeni beans had a chocolate flavour so it
was adopted for all brews of that type.
And espresso 10 doesn’t mean fast – it derives from the Latin verb “to press out”. In the process, steam or hot water is forced or “pressed” through finely ground coffee.
King Charles II banned 11 coffee houses in England in 1675, because he believed that people were meeting there to conspire against him.
The world’s longest- living cat 12 enjoyed a daily cup of coffee. Crème Puff, above, who died aged 38, started her day with coffee, eggs, bacon and broccoli.
Caffè sospeso ( Italian for 13 “suspended coffee”) is the Naples tradition of paying for an extra cup of coffee for a future customer who may be down on their luck.
Brazil grows the most coffee 14 in the world, producing 2,590,000 metric tons per year, followed by Vietnam and Colombia. But Vietnam and Indonesia 15 produce perhaps the most unusual brew – weasel coffee. It is made from coffee beans which have been eaten by a civet, passed through its system and come out the other end. Farmers then recover the beans and continue the coffee roasting process. Milk and sugar with that?