Facts About Coffee
The name coffee comes from the Arabic word qahwah, meaning wine,and not from the town of Kaffa, in Ethiopia (Abyssinia), as many writers have supposed.
Coffee is the second most traded commodity in the world. The only world commodity that is traded at higher volumes on the world market is oil.
There are two basic species of coffee in the world – Robusta coffee, which is generally considered to be lower grade, and Arabica coffee, which is considered to be higher grade. Most of the coffee sold in the world is Robusta, and the largest producer of Robusta coffee in the world is Vietnam.
Robusta coffee, which is often used in instant (or soluble) coffee, has more caffeine than Arabica coffee.
While darker coffee roasts like French roast coffee seem stronger than light coffee roasts, they actually have less caffeine than their lighter counterparts. That’s because some of the caffeine is destroyed when the coffee beans are subjected to high heat for longer periods.
Likewise, espresso has less caffeine than drip coffee. Espresso is made by forcing hot water through ground coffee under high pressure. This limits the amount of time that the water is in contact with the coffee beans, thus extracting the flavor but leaving a lot of the caffeine behind.
Green coffee beans keep for up to a year with no change in quality if they are kept in a cool, dry place. Once the coffee beans are roasted, however, they begin to lose their flavor after about 48 hours.
Ground coffee loses its freshness the fastest because far more of the bean is exposed to air and light, which leach away the flavor. That’s why coffee tastes best if you grind it right before you brew it.
Coffee cuppers have identified over 600 different unique flavors in coffee – rivaling the unique flavors that blend to make a glass of wine memorable. The flavor of coffee is dependent on region, climate and weather, and is affected by the way it is dried, stored and roasted.
The United States imports 30% of the world’s coffee crop. That’s a full 1/3rd of all coffee grown in the world. The average U.S. adult drinks 3.4 cups of coffee a day, or about 26 gallons of coffee a year.
More than 50% of U.S. adults drink at least one cup of coffee a day – but they are not the world’s largest coffee consumers. That honor belongs to Finland, followed by West Germany. Finland drinks about 5 cups of coffee per adult per day.
Coffee is grown in 53 countries around the world, all of them located between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. The coffee industry employs more than 25 million people worldwide.
Coffee is not grown anywhere in the United States except Puerto Rico and Hawaii.
Worldwide, we drink more than 400 billion cups of coffee a year.
Most of the world’s coffee is still picked by hand, one bean at a time. An experienced coffee picker can pick about 7 baskets of coffee beans a day, each weighing 50-100 kg.
