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A Brief History of Coffee
By Heidi Henken for We Like Coffee.com
Welcome to We Like Coffee.com. Actually, we LOVE coffee, and we've built this web site to share with our visitors some articles and info we've collected, as well as recipes that use coffee as a central ingredient.
It is thought that coffee as a brewed drink originated in Ethiopia, from whence it spread throughout the Arab world. According to The Horizon Cookbook and Illustrated History of Eating and Drinking Through the Ages, coffee's popularity in this part of the world can be attributed in large part to Mohammad's strictures against the consumption of wine. In fact, coffee came to be known as "the wine of Islam."
Coffeehouses, as social centers, also originated in the Middle East, and in the seventeenth century, found their way (along with coffee, of course) over the spice route to Europe.
In France, coffee flourished in cafés, and in Germany in Kaffeehauser. But in England coffeehouses became notorious centers of culture and politics. The first coffeehouse opened in England in the mid-1600s, by 1700 there were more than 2,000 coffeehouses in London, and by 1715 there were nearly 3,000.
Although acknowledged as the forerunner of that rarified institution, the English gentlemen's club, seventeenth century British coffeehouses were remarkably democratic and open to anyone. They were places that people could learn the daily news, hang out, and practice the seventeenth century equivalent of business and political networking. Hogarth's Coffeehouse even offered daily Latin lessons.
Coffeehouses became such a force in England that King Charles II ordered their suppression in 1675. This attempt at controlling coffeehouses failed, and they've been with us ever since.
Closer to the present, in the 1950s coffeehouses became North American cultural centers for the poetry, music and politics of the "beat" (beatnik) generation.
While Old World coffee continued to be artfully brewed over the centuries, its emergence as a connoisseurs' beverage in North America may be tracked back to 1971, when a small, post-hippie-era coffee roasting company opened up its first funky store in downtown Seattle, Washington, with the unlikely name of Starbucks.
Starbucks' signature "full city roast," and attention to detail became a new standard for coffee; a standard that has now grown into an international obsession for that carefully roasted and perfectly brewed cup of coffee made from high quality beans.
About the author - Heidi Henken is a former daily newspaper food editor, who visited her first beatnik coffeehouse as a small child with her mother in the late 1950s. In 1971, when she was a teenager, she and her friends drove to Seattle just to visit Starbucks, which was already causing a buzz among coffee aficionados. Later she spent one pre-Christmas holiday season working at Starbucks' original Seattle roasting plant taking catalog telephone orders. As part of her training, she attended the company's employee coffee school, where she learned the differences between types of coffee, and developed an appreciation for coffee made from fresh, well-roasted beans.
Most of the historical information for this article was gleaned from The Horizon Cookbook and Illustrated History of Eating and Drinking Through the Ages, published by American Heritage Publishing Company, Inc.
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