Is Coffee Good For You? Like so many of the beverages we enjoy today, coffee was once prescribed as a tonic for what ails you… Provided that what ails you is a lack of alertness or a sour mood,coffee and health it’s good on its promise. Let’s leave patent medicines aside for the moment, though, […]
Preparing Coffee The question of how to process just-harvested coffee is answered only in part by geography, and by the resulting natural resources… it’s also a question of tradition. A farmer of high-grown coffees on a finca or co-op in Central America wouldn’t dream of dry-processing his hard, dense and fruity beans… he’d probably sooner […]
Growing Coffee What a poignant irony that Coffea aribaca —our prized coffee tree— thrives only in sheltered, mountainous, subtropical microclimates… far flung places with steeply sloping terrain that defies every step of those who labor to tend it. coffee slopes And labor it is… prized coffee trees must be carefully tended if they are to […]
Penny University Coffee made its introduction to Europe in the early 17th century as medicine for what ails you… whether your ailment include headaches, consumption, dropsy, gout or scurvy. First offered by apothecaries in Venice and street vendors in Milan, coffee found footing in Vienna by way of a failed Ottoman invasion, and found the […]
Baba Budan’s Beans While coffee flourished in Arabian lands, the legend of its powers of sobriety and mental clarity quickly spread far beyond Arabian borders. While its historic roots are still shrouded in legend, by the middle 15th century the people of Arabia were roasting and brewing coffee to enjoy a beverage much as we […]
The Legend of Kaldi’s Dancing Goats Once upon a time, in a faraway land called Ethiopia —or maybe Abyssinia, it was a very long time ago, after all— there lived a young goatherd named Kaldi. By all accounts (and there are many, as the story has been retold many, many times) Kaldi was a very […]