The first industrial revolution thought to be stimulated by the global diffusion of coffee out of Ethiopia then to Yemen, then by trade to Europe where in the 15 century tap water was unsafe & nearly everyone was drinking beer all day. Coffee proved superior to alcoholic fermented beverages, stimulating lively discussion & intellectual inquiry by stimulating people to learn more.
Educated people want to change & improve things & make everything better. They want to get to the bottom & discover the root cause of problems, the alkaloid of interest in this or that plant or animals, the one with principles pharmacological action for example, to isolate & study with the scientific method! Thus research was kicked off by coffee & this created more products & services, tools for science at first, later adapted & commercialize as other widely diffused commercial products sold to everyone.
Industrialization kicked off the age of abundance as people were coffee stimulated into creating streamlined assembly lines & information technology. More time awake with electricity & artificial lighting, people had more time to read, for hobbies, for working long hours. Coffee the main drug of choice for the workaholic. Its a drug because it contains caffeine the wakefulness promoting alkaloid produced by the coffee plant as insect repellent. Alkaloids like caffeine are toxic to most insects nervous systems, acting as a nerve toxin to insects & pests, just like nicotine in the tobacco plant.
Coffee gradually replaced beer, both beer making & hot coffee involve hot water temperatures hot enough to sanitize the water of common parasites, bacteria & viral pathogens that were present in tap water system at the time.
To call coffee caffeine misses a lot of the chemical complexity created by the roasting of green coffee beans or coffee cherry seeds that have been dried, shipped worldwide to local roasting houses where temperatures between 350 F & 450 F for 10-20 minutes are utilized in large paddle stirred roasting machines to darken the beens, bringing out complex flavors in the process. Think toasted marshmallow or caramel or dark chocolate. Lower temperatures or lighter roast coffee tends to have more fruity & floral notes by comparison to the more richly flavored espresso roasts & similar darker roasts.
Coffee, like smoke, contains thousands of chemical compounds soluble in water & many others that are soluble in fat. So hot water extracting the coffee pulls out different substances that cooking the ground coffee in melted butter for example. Both processes can be accomplished & combined in a English Coffee Cake for example, cake that actually tastes of coffee.
Watch this Modern Marvels Episode on YouTube to learn more about coffee https://youtu.be/lmAJGymXXAc <click link to YouTube video mentioned above!
After years of loose leaf brewing green tea, I went the way of the Keurig Mini, then an Aeropress, then an Espresso Machine :) I even purchased an outrageous expensive Eureka Mignon Notte grinder to make super fine espresso grind's for my stainless steel bottomless basket kit on the GIVI-403U espresso machine / I love espresso & even got a special digital scale with an espresso mode that starts a timer as the espresso hits the collection vessel, a small 60ml double walled glass cup, part of a set, that I extract the pulls into.
Through today, I have been using a cheap Mr. Grind high speed electric grinder to grind up ~25 grams of whole bean coffee for 25 seconds to a fine espresso grind, but this only a marginal solution. A 10 second grind makes a coarse grind that works great in the Aeropress thankfully. I am very much looking forward to the highly precise Notte, an expensive espresso tool I could have never even imagined buying just 2 months ago. I went on a deep dive on YouTube researching espresso, then to google directly, lots of watching & reading later I developed the desire to make an official tasty espresso shot, something that is only possible with highly precise grind & tuning the grind for the basket & the machine with timed shots // a hobby in its own right // at great cost too. I even 3D printed a basket holder, a tamper, & a caffeine themed coaster, all in "white" PLA on the Prusa Mini FDM or FFF 3D printer :)
The first coffee house in London England opened in 1562, significant given that Queen Elizebeth just died & Prince Charles now King Charles III, something I am very glad about overall. Queen Elizabeth was an excellent monarch in her own special way during a very dynamic time in history of almost unimaginable change worldwide. Starting in the early 1990's, I became a fan of Prince Charles. I really like that he was always in love with Camilla & never gave up on it, even obtaining the approval of his mother more recently, a blessing that resulted the official Marriage of Charles & Camilla. I don't normally write about celebrities, but I consider the British Royal Family above the scope of dirty celebrity status, especially given the kinds of unsavory things that many famous people do, or engage in.
I am not perfect or without sin or flaw, so please do not mistake what I am saying as judgmental, I am only saying that I have a reverent respect for the Royal Family of England. In part because America was a colony of England & I am an American. I really like that UK joined up with America to defeat the Axis powers in World War Two WWII. I really like the Royal Society & Its Esteem for Trailblazing Scientists, Engineers & Other Exceptional People - for winners who are out there making a strong positive difference in the world! Consider the founder of Prusa Printers, Joseph Prusa, who created & continue to make the worlds best 3D printers; well by combination of value, reliability, performance, affordability, customer support, technical support & overall excellent business operations- a lot of value to a customer who buys a Prusa 3D printer!
Try this video about caffeine, tea & coffee
Dried tea & coffee was able to be traded over long distance even at slower speeds of shipping in antiquity. The plants we ultimately smuggled from one local to others with similar environments, thus the globalization of coffee & tea originates from the break up of the balance of world powers during the 18th century, when England was the world's wealthiest & most powerful country. The pull of caffeine makes it the most widely abused psychoactive substance in the world. Energy drinks, tea, & coffee, people are getting high on the wakefulness promoting caffeine that blocks adenosine from making people sleepy. Caffeine an insecticide to pests so they do not eat plants that contain caffeine, this gives these plants an advantage. Because humans prized tea & coffee, this gave these plants a further advantage in that people deliberately spent a lot of effort, time & money on tea plants & coffee plants, because tea & coffee beverages made from components of these plants, the leaves & fruit seeds respectively, are so valuable & popular worldwide.
Tea & coffee have shaped the course of history, the balance of powers between states, created some of the first large corporations, enable the cultivation of knowledge, energized the mental faculties needed to create zero the non quantity conceptual in abstract mathematical logic that went on to fuel most of al of the other sciences with the data collection focus of the isolated variable study or experiment at the core of the scientific method of acquiring knowledge about the world & phenomenon in the world, about people, plants, animals, bacteria, fungi, viruses & other lifeforms. We live in amazing times today & coffee becoming more life wine. Premium, shade grown, organic, single origin, specific roast levels, flavor & aroma profiles described with food terminology, its becoming more like wine, even grown on the vine with coffee trellis plantations in Kona, Hawaii for example.
Instant Coffee
Trending with a new generation of Generation Y or Gen Y, think people younger than millennial who grew up with a smartphone in their hands as toddlers. Add a teaspoon or 5 grams of the powdered crystals to a cup with some mouth safe hot water temperatures like 135-150 F, give a stir & bang you have coffee. Instant coffee got its start during the civil war as some soldiers built improvised coffee machines into the stock of their rifles. In World War One WWI, soldier kept metal cans filled with a mixture of dried concentrated coffee, sugar & dry milk, as a paste. Adding a spoon of this past to hot water in a metal cup, instant coffee was a smash hit with soldiers on the go. In WWII World War Two, Army K rations included packets of dry instant coffee granules & proved wildly popular. From the 1950s until the early 1990s, instant coffee became less popular as premium & specialty coffee gained momentum with the early & later prolific development of Starbucks coffee stores worldwide. These Starbucks locations also sell so much food that Starbucks has become one of the biggest fast food services in America & elsewhere. Every Starbucks location I have even visited had clean bathrooms, something that distinguishes it from other lesser fast food places, noting that they are really coffee houses with a modern food spin added to create a more dynamic user experience for a wider audience, many of whom only like sweet beverages like the popular frapacchino.
Say "Google, google, google" nearly instant search results connecting people to products & services of all kinds, instant coffee gaining popularity with the search query generation, people that grew up smack in the later global diffusion stage of the Information Age of "Smart" technologies proliferating into jewelry like rings & watches, furnitures, appliances, the internet so pervasive that most households now have a Echo device connected to an Amazon Prime account such that people in the home can just utter "hey Alexa, what is "this or that"" voice searching for information, setting reminders or times or calendar inputs, you can even shop with your voice & much more on these devices. Google has similar voice based thin network appliance interface digital voice assistants, google Home & similar. Samsung tried with Bixby but it didn't go as planned :P Samsung a deeply corrupt conglomerate so integrated into South Korea as a country that its hard to tell the delineating boundary between management as Samsung and key people in the South Korean Government. Think bribery, collusion, aggressive merger & acquisition, progress & money over people, almost like the CCP in China, but not nearly as maniacal.
Instant coffee made by hot air spray drying where a shower of concentrated coffee rained down inside a large steel silo sized vessel that's being flooded with hot air, as the coffee concentrate interacts with then super heated air it dries out & dry coffee powder collects at the bottom of the silo, onto a conveyor belt where it travels into the dry packaging line for weighing, measuring, dividing, package filling, boxing of packages, palleting the boxes & distribution into class 8 container trucks that hold about 27 pallets, or to smaller class 6 or class 4 trucks for local delivery to grocery store distribution centers or specialty stores or sometimes the large trucks load the pallets onto trains for long distance bulk transport to distant markets. More recent innovation introduced freeze drying to instant coffee of superior quality. In the freeze drying process, very concentrated coffee frozen into large blocks. The frozen coffee ice loaded into a vacuum chamber with very cold walls or an ice collection heat exchanger. As the vacuum pulled on the coffee ice water in the ice sublimes into a gas, skipping the liquid phase, the water gas from the coffee ice then sticks to the much colder walls of the freeze dryer or to the ultra cold heat exchanger. Freeze drying the coffee concentrate keeps more of the flavors & aromas, producing a superior instant coffee.
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