A warm stimulating beverage enjoyed daily by billions of people worldwide, coffee that legal stimulating beverage of choice that along with Tea helped to wake mankind up to produce the Enlightenment & first coal powered industrial revolution, the oil powered second industrial revolution, the renewable focused third industrial revolution & today the emergent #4IR or fourth industrial revolution (big data information technology & generalized artificial intelligence)
Today energy drinks & other caffeine containing food stuffs & beverages are jolting people through monotonous software development & other dull information pushing activities at the core of emerging technologies, investment, education, medical data, big data, information technology, networking, internet & many other industries today!
Improving agility, focus, mental concentration, attention span & executive function while promoting wakefulness, the coffee beverage provides caffeine & thousands of other molecules in hot water infusions made with ground up coffee seeds (beans) previously harvested green from coffee cherries of which about 4000 grow on one mature coffee tree, separated from the berry into two seeds, collected, bagged in heavy burlap sacks & shipped around the world to roasting houses that heat roast the seeds to enhance the flavor & produce black coffee beans, which are later ground into fine coffee grounds to make hot water infusions that stimulate people that drink them.
Northeaster Ethiopian Goats that were eating coffee tree berries would start acting wild if they ate enough & goat herders in antiquity noticed this & began to investigate consumption of the berries & later the seeds, first in edible fruit bean balls in Northeastern Africa, a couple of hundred miles from Yemen. Slaves brought to Yemen by Arabic traders brought these coffee berry balls with them & the Arabic scholars during the Middle Ages develop what we now know as coffee, the first significant style that of Turkish coffee, a mixture made of sugar & coffee grounds & water, mixed & boiled 3 times before serving.
Coffee houses spawned the first newspapers, a precursor to TV News & Internet information about almost everything. 100 million bags of coffee every year consumed. Grown in more than 20 countries around the world, millions of pounds of coffee enter American roasting plants every week.
Computerized inventory systems are applied. Beans are cleaned in a green state through a pneumatic cleaning system, with vacuum, vibrating screens & magnets & then they enter a large clothes dryer like roaster, poured into a large cooling pan for spin cooling. 350-450F temps used to roast the coffee.
A specialty coffee explosion happening around the world. Starbucks serves people in 35 different countries & serves up more than 40 million servings of coffee daily. Coffee is a romantic beverage filled with history & a beverage of truth.
Coffee beans are actually coffee seeds. A typical coffee berry from a coffee tree containing about 4000 berries. Goats stimulated by eating coffee & human tribes in Ethiopia, where coffee first cultivated. Moving across the red sea into Arabia, where the intellectuals in the Ottoman empire became the repository of knowledge during the dark & Middle Ages in Europe. Coffee in 1550 in Constantinople now Istanbul Turkey began to be served in the world's first coffee houses, where Turkish coffee made in am ibrik, where sugar & water & coffee triple boiled.
During this time in Europe, people were drinking beer all day because the water was toxic with pathogenic bacteria & viral contaminates. Working heavy machinery that gave rise to modern society was not possible when everyone was drunk on beer all the time, so the workaholic protestant ethic (can do, pragmatic, DIY) in Victorian England, started emerging in 1652 when the first penny university opened, where people could get a cup of coffee for 1 penny & would hang out all day debating & discussing different trending topics.
Sober intellectual discussion displaced beer drunkenness & the basis of modern democracy voting started in coffee houses. Not just a caffeine stimulant for commerce, you see the entire era wired by caffeine. Swift & Poe & Isac Newton, & other notable intellectuals in different industries would patronize specific coffee houses.
In the 1600's the worlds coffee supply mainly came from Yemen. The shipping dominate Dutch East India trading company helped to move coffee & coffee trees to France & then to Central & South America. More seedlings made it to the Kona district of Hawaii. By 1828 Samuel Ruggles started planting coffee along with Japanese immigrants who specialized in coffee agriculture. The tropical climate & rich volcanic soil in Hawaii helps to make exceptional coffee grow.
Coffee berries are picked, taken to processing shed, the seeds separate from the berry pulp using a rotary pin pulper. After pulping, the wet coffee beans still have their inner covering parchment. A vibratory screening box setup used to first dry the beans & help to shake agitate the parchment layer off. The seeds are then laid out on large sun heated surfaces to finish dry them as the workers rake & tend the drying seeds to evenly dry the organic mass throughout.
German company PROBAT started building mechanized coffee roasting machines with 30lbs of capacity in the 1920's. This helped to increase batch processing throughput & inspired the development of newer generation much larger higher capacity machines with similar functions & working principles of operation, widely utilized by coffee roasters today!
Hills & Bros in San Fran Cisco, Ca in 1881 started importing coffee beans from Central & South America & roasting them; the aroma around their factory attracted customers as coffee roasting produces wonderful smells, as does coffee brewing. That same company developed & produced the familiar vacuum-packed metal coffee cans still used to sell coffee today. Vacuum packing enhanced the shelf life of coffee in the cans & became widely utilized by wholesale coffee businesses around 1910. MJB & Folgers provided competition for Hills & Bros. Back then the vacuum pot was the most popular way to brew coffee & this method & similar mechanism & appliances are trending in sales today, just like spicy foods & air fryers. Eastern USA coffee sales were dominated by the Arbuckle company with the popular brand YUBAN emerging, the name a truncation of yuletide banquette. Maxwell House absorbed YUBAN & Arbuckle, started by a chef in an aptly named Hotel in Eastern Tennessee who was fanatical about his coffee blending.
Mass media campaigns created by New York Ad companies helped to create a national coffee craze by selling the American public a North African Arabic developed stimulating beverage first in print advertisements, then on radio ad's & then via TV ad's & now via Internet Ad's, clickbait titles & other methods with smartphone texts & coupons & brand specific apps, as K-pods on Amazon & Ebay & via bulk packs at Costco & Safeway. A feedback loop between coffee consumption, broadcasting & advertising stimulated economic growth throughout the 20th century. Coffee fueled minds started Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Tesla, Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo, EBAY, Google & other huge corporations like GM & Ford & Monsanto. Coffee keeps people away, enabling them to work more hours! This fueled the American 40+ hour work week & a loss of work life balance that was partially regained with the passage of egalitarian laws & measures that expanded social security, Medicare & Medicaid in the 1960's.
The most popular brewing method of industrial coffee by the 1950s was the percolator unit that repeatedly over brews the grounds by Soxhlet or continuous extraction of continually boiling the water with the coffee grounds. All the flavorful aromas & tastes are lost in this way. Percolator coffee machines producing a bland acidic infusion of coffee inferior in every way to proper flavor, taste & smell preserving methods of coffee preparation widely employed today. Specialty coffees, French press brewed, Keurig K-pods, Tully's or Starbucks, cold brewed, gravity brewed, AeroPress coffee & many other specialty techniques & methods to make coffee are trending & popular today.
In typical capitalist quality failure form, once the families that started these coffee roasters in America were replaced by greedy narrow minded ignorant stupid accountants, the quality of coffee sold to American's started to decline. In order to endlessly boost next quarters earnings & profit, these capitalist corporate raiders started using cheaper & cheaper coffee beans in the popular brand blends; such that the taste, color & aroma & quality of the resulting coffee produced, steadily declined. After years of inferior coffee access, a renewed interest in premium European coffee developed, significant after Howard Shultz, the founder of Starbucks went on an Italian coffee house tour, bringing his new appreciate for quality coffee back to Seattle, Wa, where he founded his now world-famous brand, Starbucks. My father called it "charbucks" because of the "over roasted" dark intense flavor that some people really love, while he preferred the lighter blond roasting techniques & flavor & aroma preserving lightly roasted coffee prepared by Tully's.
Meg & I previously tea drinkers until my sister gave my mother a Keurig machine. My mother hates bitter flavors, so coffee is not her thing, so when my brother-in-law Drake died, I needed something to sharpen my focus more & wanted something a little stronger than tea. I looked at the diused Keurig & when Meg & I went to Safeway the next time, I inspired the purchasing of many different kinds of coffee in K-pods to discover the coffee style that Meg & I might most enjoy. Meg enjoys lighter blends while I like just about any kind of coffee.
I get Maud's multipacks on Amazon that contain a mix of different coffee types, from different countries, with different roasting styles. That daily variety a kind of spice in life that I really enjoy since I now for the first time in my whole life really enjoy trying different food & drink items more, with a more exploratory focus encouraged by Meg's dad Alan. He patronizes many different micro-breweries & never buys name brand beers or coffees from the industrial produces. He likes the local brands & small brands & small roasters & small breweries such that any purchases of beer or coffee help to fund local businesses & create a smaller local circular economy growth that helps your family & friends & neighbors nearby.
Won't you be my neighbor? said one of greatest hero's Mr. Rogers. Many other people encourage local buying to reduce the carbon footprint of items we consume daily. This is part of a focus to get away from crony capitalism & large business that just become bigger & too large by forming monopolies like Amazon.com. I have a proto-socialist world view based on loving ethical & moral principles from following Jesus Christ & my faith in God!
Shultz when commenting on the value proposition that his Starbucks locations offer customers was suggesting that the flat bland acidic coffee American's had been drinking for about 50 years enabled Starbucks to position other offerings in the coffee space as a "trial vehicle" to help move Americans beyond mediocre coffee to premium sophisticated flavors with more dynamic taste & smell, something that creates a more enjoyable coffee drink experience.
Now that more baby boomers are well healed & looking for more "premium products" a growing market formed for small batch, local, ultra-premium, more flavorful, better smelling, deeper aroma products, you could call this sophistication of the olfactory bulb & tongue receptor information handling generalizations in the forebrain, that white matter & grey matter brain tissue behind your eyes that enables you to think human adult thoughts with more detail & complexity than other animals in nature. This is why humans have music & art & other animals do not create such things. Coffee & caffeine enhance our executive function & help us to think & do more, faster & more effectively, as individuals & as teams of people working together to make bigger things happen!
In the late 1940's Italian inventors developed the base technology of what has become today's most expensive espresso machines, still made in Italy. Costing up to $10,000 USD, these machines utilized a pressurized steam extraction method that blow high pressure high temperature water stream through coffee grounds trapped in a metal drip container, where the hot pressurized steam forced through the coffee then exists down drip channels into small ceramic cups. Steamed & frothed milk & then carefully poured to create visual patterns on the top surface of the resulting espresso. This version of coffee took off in 1950's Italy & then spread throughout Europe.
As the pace of modern life continues increasing, more people started turning to vacuum dried instant coffee powder that you simply add to a cup & then add warm or hot water to & give a stir, & you have coffee nearly instantly. The process of making instant coffee required the development of industrial sized batch freeze driers. They first grind the coffee beans into grounds, brew the grounds, concentrate the brew & then vacuum desiccate or cold dry the concentrated brew into a dry powder most people know as instant coffee; now available in "Organic" versions today!
World War 1 caused the Department of Defense to purchase all of inventor George Washington's refined coffee, the first version of instant coffee made of dehydrated coffee. Soldiers were so enamored with coffee that some of them installed a miniaturized coffee brewer into the buttstock of their rifles. A crude from of instant coffee was made by soldiers who added sugar & milk & coffee ground to form a thick past in a metal can that was held over a fire to dry the past. To make coffee, a soldier would take a spoonful of this dried past & add it to his cup with some hot water & the rusting coffee was actually decent.
World War II stirred up a renewed interest in coffee that had waned after the end of WWI. Coffee from 12 different suppliers ended up in the K-rations of soldiers. The first major instant coffee production method, the hot spray drying technique produced instant coffee using rising hot air into a steam of atomized falling concentrated coffee droplets, excess heating damaged the flavor & smell components & resulted in a flatter blander tasting instant coffee.
Freez dried instant coffee done by brewing coffee, freezing it into super cold ice blocks, shredding that ice into frozen cold trays which are then inserted into the racks of a vacuum freeze drier, where low temperature heating under the trays sublimates the water off at near freezing temperatures that sticks to the walls of the freeze drier. Meg & I own a compact Harvest Right freeze drier but have never made instant coffee. The intensive nature of processing coffee this way does not make sense on such a small scale for us, especially given the time & energy costs of operating this unit. Just maintaining the vacuum pump with purified mineral oil changes every cycle & oil recycling to reduce operating costs, a huge headache that few normal people would do to make instant coffee at home. More money spent in the coffee trade than any other commodity industry except oil! It wakes people up & keeps people running, the gasoline in our veins & brains, that CNS stimulant that has people energize & vibrating to create more renewable energy & organic foods & other health changes to boring industrialization that fueled economic growth during our grandparent's generation, who unwittingly drank that dull percolated junk //
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