Gourmet Coffee Facts:

If your morning routine includes a cup or two of coffee, you may know a few things about it. It's a stimulant drink, it comes from beans that are roasted and ground and, for many of us, it's a staple of life. But do you know where coffee grows and how it gets to America ? How a French roast differs from an Italian roast? What a coffee cherry is? Or how decaffeinated coffee is made?

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There's much more to that morning cup o' Joe than you may realize! In this article, we'll look at coffee's origins and how it spread, where it's grown, how it's harvested and processed and what roasting is all about. We'll finish by learning how to make a really great cup of coffee.

The History of Coffee:

Coffee's story begins with a goat, at least in legends. It's said that Kaldi, an Ethiopian goatherd, noticed his goats acting very frisky after eating a certain shrub. He took some of the shrub's berries for himself, caught the buzz and coffee's future was secured.

Originally, coffee was a food, not a drink. Early East African tribes mixed the coffee berries (the unhulled bean, also called a coffee cherry) with animal fat, forming energy balls -- something like primitive Power Bars. Coffee also grew on the Arabian Peninsula , and it was there that it was first developed into a hot drink, sometime around A.D. 1000. By the 13th century, Muslims were drinking coffee fervently. The "whirling dervishes" of early Islam may have been fueled by coffee.

As Islam spread, so did coffee. But the Arabs closely guarded the coffee plants, and no fertile seeds were found outside Arabia (with the exception of the other place where coffee grew naturally, Africa ) until the 1600s. Another coffee legend states that an Indian smuggler named Baba Budan left Mecca with fertile seeds strapped to his chest. Soon, coffee plants were growing in India .

As European traders returned from exotic locales such as Turkey , they brought news of and a new-found taste for the black beverage. It was the Dutch who founded the first European coffee estate on the island of Java , then a Dutch colony (now part of Indonesia ), in 1616.

Coffee crossed the Atlantic around 1727. Yet another coffee legend: Brazil 's emperor asks a spy, Lt. Col. Palheta, to smuggle seeds into the country. Palheta goes to French Guiana , exudes his considerable charm on the governor's wife and leaves with a farewell bouquet -- spiked with coffee seedlings. Brazil is now the world's top coffee producer.

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