5 COFFEE (Bean) Uses

Aaaah.  Coffee.  Who doesn't like the smell of a fresh cup of coffee first thing in the morning?  Fresh ground coffee beans are even better.

Coffee plants are cultivated in over 70 countries, primarily in equatorial Latin America, Southeast Asia,and Africa. Once ripe, coffee "berries" are picked, processed, and dried to yield the seeds inside. The seeds are then roasted to varying degrees, depending on the desired flavor, before being ground and brewed to create coffee.

The story of Kaldi, the 9th-century Ethiopian goatherder who supposedly discovered coffee when his goats behaved strangely after eating from a coffee plant, did not appear in writing until 1671 and is probably of doubtful authenticity, although widely circulated as being true.

The earliest credible evidence of either coffee drinking or knowledge of the coffee tree appears in the middle of the 15th century, in the Sufi monasteries around Mocha in Yemen. It was here in Arabia that coffee seeds were first roasted and brewed, in a similar way to how it is now prepared. By the 16th century, it had

Roasted coffee beans - wikipedia

reached the rest of the Middle East, Persia, Turkey, and northern Africa. Coffee seeds were first exported from Ethiopia to Yemen. Yemeni traders brought coffee back to their homeland and began to cultivate the seed. The first coffee smuggled out of the Middle East was by Sufi Baba Budan from Yemen to India in 1670. Before then, all exported coffee was boiled or otherwise sterilised. Portraits of Baba Budan depict him as having smuggled seven coffee seeds by strapping them to his chest. The first plants grown from these smuggled seeds were planted in Mysore. Coffee then spread to Italy, and to the rest of Europe, to Indonesia, and to the Americas.

Did you know, coffee was the first food to be freeze-dried? Read on to learn more facts about coffee... after reading about its many uses!



The Many Uses of Coffee (Beans):


Reduce Fireplace Mess. Want to clean your fireplace without causing a dust storm? Wait until the embers are cool, sprinkle damp coffee grounds all over the ashes , let them sit for about 15 minutes and then scoop out the whole mess into a metal ash can. The coffee grounds cling to the ashes, so they don't spew dust nearly as much as they would otherwise.