Coffee
Coffee is a brewed beverage made from the roasted and ground seeds of the Coffea shrub, prized for its stimulating caffeine and its bittersweet, aromatic character. From a single brewing tradition in the Red Sea region it has become one of the world's most widely consumed drinks, served hot or chilled and in an enormous range of preparations.
Usage in beverages
Coffee is consumed black or with milk, cream, sugar, and spices; brewed by boiling, steeping, dripping, or high-pressure extraction; served hot, iced, cold-brewed, or nitrogenated; combined with spirits in liqueur coffees; and used as the base for an entire family of espresso-and-milk drinks as well as coffee-based desserts.
In depth
Origins in Yemen and the Sufi brew
Although the coffee plant grew wild in the Ethiopian highlands, the earliest reliable evidence of coffee being prepared and drunk as a beverage points to Yemen in the middle of the 15th century. Sufi devotees there valued the dark, bitter infusion for its ability to keep them alert through long nights of prayer and devotional ritual. The seeds were roasted and steeped much as they are today, and the drink spread through Yemeni port towns such as Aden, Mocha, and Zabid before moving northward to Cairo and the wider Islamic world. For most of the following two centuries Yemen remained the world's principal source of coffee, and the port of Mocha lent its name to the trade itself.[1]
Turkish coffee and the Ottoman coffeehouse
As coffee moved into Ottoman lands it acquired a distinctive method that endures across the Middle East, the Balkans, and the Caucasus. Very finely ground beans are simmered, unfiltered, in a small long-handled pot called a cezve, often with sugar, and poured grounds and all into a small cup where the powder settles. The result is a strong, intensely aromatic coffee crowned with foam. Around this drink grew the institution of the coffeehouse, which appeared in Istanbul by the mid-16th century and became a hub of conversation, music, storytelling, and fortune-telling read from the spent grounds. The same preparation travels under many regional names, including Greek, Armenian, Bosnian, and Serbian coffee, the labels often shaped by national feeling as much as by recipe.[2]
Coffee enters Europe and meets milk
From the Ottoman Empire coffee passed into western Europe, reaching Venice and then spreading across the continent during the 17th century, with coffeehouses opening from Oxford to Vienna. Europeans tended to dislike the black, bitter Turkish version, and the drink only became broadly popular once it was diluted, sweetened, and softened with milk. Combining coffee with hot milk effectively domesticated it for French and other European palates, giving rise to enduring milk-coffee traditions. The French café au lait, coffee with hot scalded or steamed milk typically taken at breakfast, is the classic example; a New Orleans variant blends the coffee with roasted chicory, a habit born of wartime shortages and now drunk alongside sugar-dusted beignets.[3]
The Italian espresso revolution
Coffee reached Italy in the 16th century, and by the late 19th century inventors there were racing to brew it faster and in individual servings. Early steam-driven machines gave way, after a 1901 Milanese patent and decades of refinement, to the modern espresso pioneered in the 1940s, in which hot water is forced under roughly nine bars of pressure through finely ground, compacted coffee. The technique yields a small, concentrated drink with a creamy reddish-brown foam called crema, more intense and full-bodied than drip coffee. Espresso became the foundation of Italian café culture and, through the 20th and 21st centuries, of coffee bars worldwide. It is also the building block for nearly every contemporary specialty drink, served on its own as a shot or stretched with hot water into an americano or long black.[4]
Espresso and milk: latte and cappuccino
The pairing of espresso with steamed milk produced a whole category of beverages. The caffè latte combines one or more espresso shots with a generous volume of steamed milk, served in a large glass or cup with only a thin layer of foam, giving a mild, milky coffee; the fine microfoam can be poured into decorative latte-art patterns. The cappuccino, smaller and topped with a thicker layer of milk foam, takes its name and color from the brown robes of Capuchin friars and traces an evolution back to the Viennese Kapuziner. In Italy these milky drinks are traditionally morning fare, rarely ordered after a meal, whereas abroad they are consumed at all hours and in far larger sizes. Both spread globally with the late-20th-century specialty-coffee boom and remain among the most popular café orders.[5]
Coffee with spirits and as dessert
Coffee also pairs readily with alcohol and with frozen sweets. Irish coffee, developed in mid-20th-century Ireland and popularized in the United States, layers hot sweetened coffee laced with Irish whiskey beneath a float of lightly whipped cream, the coffee sipped through the cool topping; it gave its name to a family of liqueur coffees made with rum, Scotch, vodka, or tequila. On the dessert side, the Italian affogato "drowns" a scoop of vanilla or plain-milk gelato in a shot of hot espresso, sometimes with a splash of liqueur, blurring the line between a drink and a dessert eaten with a spoon. Both show how coffee's bittersweet intensity complements cream, sugar, and spirits.[6]
Cold brew and the modern era
Recent decades have foregrounded chilled and slow-extracted coffees. Cold brew is made by steeping coarsely ground beans in cool or room-temperature water for twelve to twenty-four hours, then filtering out the grounds to leave a concentrate that is diluted and usually served over ice. Because the coffee never meets hot water, its flavor and acidity profile differ from conventional brewing, yielding a smoother, less sharply acidic cup. A slow-drip variant, sometimes called Kyoto-style or "Dutch coffee," reflects a long Japanese tradition. The nitro variation, introduced at third-wave coffee shops in the early 2010s, charges cold brew with nitrogen gas to give it a creamy, cascading head reminiscent of draft stout, served chilled and without ice to preserve the foam.[7]
Related
References
- [1]EncyclopediaCoffee — Wikipedia↑§1
- [2]EncyclopediaTurkish coffee — Wikipedia↑§2
- [3]EncyclopediaCafé au lait — Wikipedia↑§3
- [4]EncyclopediaEspresso — Wikipedia↑§4
- [5]EncyclopediaCappuccino — Wikipedia↑§5
- [6]EncyclopediaIrish coffee — Wikipedia↑§6
- [7]EncyclopediaCold brew coffee — Wikipedia↑§7