The History of Coffee

In 1637 a meeting place in Oxford started to sell a new hot bitter drink, which had just been introduced into Britain. This drink was called coffee, which was soon to become very fashionable amongst the well to do.

Coffee had been discovered in Ethiopia thousands of years before. At this time the local tribes mixed the fruit of coffee plants with fat and ate them. Before AD 1000 the Arabs used coffee cherries to make cold drinks. Within 200 years a hot drink made from coffee beans was available throughout the Middle East.

Coffee Houses – the Beginning

In the early 17th Century, traders brought coffee to Europe. Pope Clement VIII (1536-1605) gave coffee his blessing and the first coffee house opened in Italy. Coffee houses opened all over Europe and they became popular places to meet friends or conduct business. It is rumoured that Lloyd’s Insurance and the Stock Exchange both developed from the 17th Century coffee houses.

Coffee is grown mainly in Brazil, Colombia, Ivory Coast, Uganda and Central America. The berry is ground and used in most countries as a breakfast beverage.

Chocolate

Chocolate starts life as a bean within a pod produced by the cocoa plant. Today, the beans are produced from West African trees. The pods are harvested and the beans are left to ferment. The beans are stored in a temperature of 500O C between layers of banana leaves and left for 5-6 days. After this, the beans are dried in the sun.

The beans are then shipped off to the chocolate factory where they are cleaned and roasted. They are then processed and ground into a liquid known as cocoa mass. Further processing, forces out the oily cocoa butter and the remaining block is ground into cocoa which can be used for drinking chocolate.

Chocolate bars are manufactured from a mixture of cocoa mass sugar and spices. Milk