About coffee
Coffee is a religion
Pause for a moment, look around you – the moment is beautiful….
The word coffee sounds and means something personal to everyone. Coffee has a lot to offer. For some it is a dream drink, for others a moment to enjoy the taste and aroma, and for still others it is simply an invigorating drink. Rudolf Carnap wrote: “Coffee is not just a drink, it is a religion. I don’t know about you, but I have the whole world in my cup. Hot, aromatic, with a million shades of flavor.”
The history of coffee in Germany
There is hardly a German who doesn’t drink coffee in the morning. Like the French and Italians, Germans have long been fans of the aromatic, invigorating drink. 85 percent of Germans drink coffee every day, most of them several cups a day.
The history of coffee’s amazing adventures in Germany goes back more than 450 years. In the late 16th century, the first coffee beans arrived in northern Germany via traders and travelers. However, it was another hundred years before the Germans began to enjoy coffee and the first coffee houses appeared in the cities. In them, people could not only enjoy the taste and aroma of the unusual “Persian drink”, as coffee was called at the time, but also discuss various political, philosophical and worldly topics. Johann Sebastian Bach, who wrote the famous coffee cantata, enthused: “Hey, how sweet coffee tastes! Sweeter than a thousand kisses, softer than muscatel wine,” sang the soprano about the benefits of coffee.
The first coffee house in Germany was in Regensburg. Opened in 1686, the Prinzessinnen-Kaffeehaus has been offering its visitors a cup of flavored coffee and cake for 335 years. However, there are several authentic coffee houses in various German cities such as Hamburg, Bremen, Hanover and Leipzig that claim to be the first coffee house in Germany. Be that as it may, the fact is that coffee has long been an integral part of German life and has become the national drink alongside beer. Today, it is hard to imagine that these drinks were once irreconcilable rivals. In fact, many Germans, having acquired a taste for coffee, began to – horrors! – prefer it to beer. The Germans’ love of coffee is confirmed by the statistics. Coffee consumption in Germany is increasing from year to year and now far exceeds beer consumption: almost 150 liters compared to just over 100 liters per average consumer per year.”
What is coffee?
So let’s go back to the origins of coffee. The history of coffee as a beverage goes back to ancient times. Ethiopia is considered the birthplace of coffee. It must be emphasized that coffee only grows wild in Ethiopia, where it was not previously cultivated by humans, as coffee was not used here.
There are several versions of his discovery, but I would like to tell you one that concerns the shepherd Kaldi. It takes us back to the middle of the 9th century, when people first learned about the miracle berries that gave them unexpected powers. It was not humans who first learned of the miraculous effect, but goats, who were more curious, and it was a shepherd named Kaldi who noticed the effect. He noticed that his goats became lively after eating the berries and began to gallop wildly. He then took the berries to a local monastery, where the monks tasted them and, convinced of their effects, began to use the brew to keep themselves awake during the long night services.
This is how coffee entered our world, changed our lives and added an element of liveliness and unpredictability. Coffee trees are grown in more than 80 countries. The coffee varieties are classified according to various parameters: quality and type of beans, type of fruit processing or degree of roasting. Arabica is grown on 75 % of the acreage, the remaining fields are used for Robusta. South America is still the leading exporter of coffee beans, while Asia and Europe are in second and third place.