The date today is June 19th, 2013 and I am, as always, drinking a cup coffee. I often found myself wondering… How long this has been going on for? How many cups of coffees have been consumed? How many people have experienced the pleasure of a warm cup a’ joe? How many haven’t? Well, to tell you the truth, I have no clue. Nobody does, but a little research goes a long way. The rest we can guess.
It’s been somewhere around 600 years since the first recorded consumption and knowledge of the coffee plant was documented (1200 if we’re considering myths and legends). The coffee plant made its journey from Ethopia to the first cafes in Constantinople, found its way to Mecca, then to Venice and throughout Europe. Pilgrim, John Smith then transported the plant to the “New World” in 1607, followed by the theft of a portion of King Louis XIV’s only coffee plant in 1718 by a French Naval Officer by the name of Gabriel de Clieu. Gabriel nursed the plant for weeks while bringing it over thousands of miles of ocean to South America, starting what is today, one of the largest coffee crop producing regions in the world.
Over the next couple hundred years, coffee continued to spread throughout the world and of course, as the coffee spread, more and more brewing methods were being conjured up as well. Bringing us all the way from the first espresso machine invented 1901 to the insanely capable La Marzocco I’m using today here in The Pancake Epidemic. There has been a major evolution in the farming, cultivation, roasting and brewing of the Coffee plant over the last 600-1200 years and I think it’s safe to say that it tastes better now more than ever.