Portal:Coffee

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Introduction

A cup of black coffee

Coffee is a beverage brewed from roasted coffee beans. Darkly colored, bitter, and slightly acidic, coffee has a stimulating effect on humans, primarily due to its caffeine content. It has the highest sales in the world market for hot drinks.

The seeds of the Coffea plant's fruits are separated to produce unroasted green coffee beans. The beans are roasted and then ground into fine particles typically steeped in hot water before being filtered out, producing a cup of coffee. It is usually served hot, although chilled or iced coffee is common. Coffee can be prepared and presented in a variety of ways (e.g., espresso, French press, caffè latte, or already-brewed canned coffee). Sugar, sugar substitutes, milk, and cream are often added to mask the bitter taste or enhance the flavor.

Though coffee is now a global commodity, it has a long history tied closely to food traditions around the Red Sea. The earliest credible evidence of coffee drinking as the modern beverage appears in modern-day Yemen in southern Arabia in the middle of the 15th century in Sufi shrines, where coffee seeds were first roasted and brewed in a manner similar to how it is now prepared for drinking. The coffee beans were procured by the Yemenis from the Ethiopian Highlands via coastal Somali intermediaries, and cultivated in Yemen. By the 16th century, the drink had reached the rest of the Middle East and North Africa, later spreading to Europe. (Full article...)

The rules and orders of the coffeehouse

In 17th- and 18th-century England, coffeehouses served as public social places where men would meet for conversation and commerce. For the price of a penny, customers purchased a cup of coffee and admission. Travellers introduced coffee as a beverage to England during the mid-17th century; previously it had been consumed mainly for its supposed medicinal properties. Coffeehouses also served tea and hot chocolate as well as a light meal.

The historian Brian Cowan describes English coffeehouses as "places where people gathered to drink coffee, learn the news of the day, and perhaps to meet with other local residents and discuss matters of mutual concern." The absence of alcohol created an atmosphere in which it was possible to engage in more serious conversation than in an alehouse. Coffeehouses also played an important role in the development of financial markets and newspapers.

Topics discussed included politics and political scandals, daily gossip, fashion, current events, and debates surrounding philosophy and the natural sciences. Historians often associate English coffeehouses, during the 17th and 18th centuries, with the intellectual and cultural history of the Age of Enlightenment: they were an alternate sphere, supplementary to the university. Political groups frequently used coffeehouses as meeting places. (Full article...)
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Raf or raf coffee is a popular coffee drink in some countries of the former USSR, which appeared in the late 1990s. Prepared by adding cream and vanilla sugar to a single shot of espresso and then foaming the mix with a steam heater. The main differences from latte are the use of vanilla sugar and cream instead of milk and the fact that the whole mix is foamed together instead of just milk. Syrup is often used instead of vanilla sugar. (Full article...)

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Galão is a hot drink from Portugal made of espresso and foamed milk. In all similar to café latte or café au lait, it comes in a tall glass with about one quarter coffee, three quarters foamed milk, as opposed to the smaller Garoto (coffee) that is served in a demitasse/espresso smaller china cup.

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Roasted coffee beans
Roasted coffee beans
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