29 Unbelievable Facts You Didn’t Know About Coffee

IT’S EASY TO ROAST YOUR OWN COFFEE

Buying roasted coffee is actually a relatively new phenomenon. Until around the 1950s, it was common to buy green beans and then roast them at home when needed. Basic roasting merely involves dry-frying the beans in a frying pan (without oil), constantly rotating and moving them to evenly roast the bean to a medium-dark brown.

 

HOW MUCH COFFEE IS DRUNK?

Around the world, an astonishing 2.25 billion cups of coffee are consumed each and every day, on average.

 

HOW IS THE COFFEE BEAN HARVESTED?

The vast majority of quality coffee is handpicked, since the coffee berries tend to ripen at different times even on the same bush. Handpicking also makes good sense, since the steep slopes on which much coffee is grown makes mechanical picking close to impossible.

 

ROBUSTA AND ARABICA

Robusta coffees (with their typical burnt-rubber flavors) have a much higher caffeine content than arabica coffees; around twice as much in fact.

 

COFFEE SHOPS STARTED REVOLUTIONS

In the seventeenth century, coffee shops were the central meeting places of activists, intellects and anyone else with something they wanted to talk about. In 1675, the English King Charles II banned coffee shops for fear they were brewing as much discontent as they were coffee, while the French Revolution was initiated in a cafe.