Coffee...

The world’s first coffee shop is reputed to have opened in Constantinople in 1475 and the first coffee plants were only introduced to South America in 1723. Today more than 400 billion cups are drunk every year; the U.S. being the world’s largest consumer. The coffee filters was invented in 1908 by housewives from Dresden, Germany. Melitta Bentz was looking for a way to brew a perfect cup of coffee without the bitterness often caused by over brewing. She decided to try making filtered coffee, pouring boiling water over ground coffee and filtering out the coffee grounds. Mellitta experimented with different materials, until she found that the blotting paper that he son used for schooling worked best. She cut a round piece of blotting paper, put it in a metal cap, and the first coffee filter was born. Shortly thereafter, Mellita and her husband, Hugo, launched the company that still bears her name.

Coffee grows on trees that reach a height of up to 6 meters, but growers keep them pruned to about 2 meters to simplifying picking and encourage heavy berry production. The first visibility of coffee tree is the appearance of small white blossoms, which fill the air with a heady aroma reminiscent of jasmine and orange. The mature tree bears cherry-sized oval berries, each containing two coffee beans with their flat solid together. A mature coffee tree will produce 450 grams of coffee per growing season. It takes 2000 hand-picked Arabic coffee berries to make 2.2 kilograms of roasted coffee.