golfkat Travel Blog

There are more than 37,000 coffee shops in the United States, about 40 percent of which are owned by Starbucks, according to Allegra’s World Coffee Portal. Americans spend tens of billions of dollars on coffee every year — and yet, they’re actually modest coffee drinkers in terms of per-capita consumption. In fact, they’re not even among the International Coffee Organization’s top 20 coffee-consuming countries.

No. 1 on the list? Finland, which blows away the competition by consuming 12kg of coffee per capita every year. According to the U.K.’s Independent newspaper, this is due in part to the fact that coffee breaks at work are protected by law. Coffee is also a big part of the social scene; it’s custom to offer coffee whenever you have a guest. Don’t expect to find a Starbucks on every corner, though — local or national establishments far outnumber multinational chains, per Culture Trip, possibly thanks to the Finns’ preference for very light brews. They share their love of coffee with other Nordic countries including Norway, Iceland, and Denmark, which rank second, third, and fourth on the ICO’s list of the world’s biggest coffee drinkers.

What do we really know about our favorite morning beverage?

Coffee dates back to 800AD, when sheepherders noticed the effect of caffeine on their goats, who ate the fruit of the coffea plant.  A monk made a drink with the produce, which kept him up all night!

Coffee is technically the seed of the bean, and the coffee berries can be eaten as a food.

The two main types are Arabica, and Robusta, which is slightly more bitter and higher in caffeine.

As you guessed, Brazil is the largest coffee grower in the world.  Surprisingly, Vietnam is second.

Only two U.S. states produce coffee.  Hawaii, obviously with its Kona coffee, and now California.

Expresso means “pressed out” in Italian, made by forcing boiling water through pressed coffee grounds, but it  would take three shots to equal the caffeine in one up of coffee.

The world’s most expensive coffee comes from the feces of the Asian palm civet.  This little creature eats the entire coffee cherry, and is unable to digest the bean.  The excreted seed produces a smoother, less acidic brew, called kopi luwak, at $600 a pound!

Back in 1511, leaders in Mecca believed it stimulated radical thinking and outlawed the drink. Some 16th-century Italian clergymen also tried to ban coffee because they believed it to be “satanic.” However, Pope Clement VII loved coffee so much that he lifted the ban and had coffee baptized in 1600.

Thirty cups constitutes a lethal dose of coffee.  We see this periodically in the ER when kids ingest too many “energy” drinks.

Sorry, Seattle, but Finns drink 27.5 pounds of coffee yearly.  Americans register only 11 pounds yearly.

Moderate (3 to 4 cups) coffee drinkers tend to live longer.

What is decaf coffee?  An 8 ounce of brewed decaf contains 2 to 12 mg of caffeine.  A regular up contains 95 to 200 mg.

I am sure that is more than you ever wanted to know about our favorite morning beverage.  So, if you are forced to give up your workplace coffee, or your Starbucks habit, try some of my favorite, Peet’s.

Did you know?  (Some levity while you are under house arrest)

The next time you unwrap a candy bar, think about this: It takes a whopping 400 to 500 cacao beans to make just one pound of chocolate, according to Ag Hires and the Hershey Story. And making and harvesting cacao is no easy feat, either. It takes up to five years for cacao trees to yield their first crop of cacao pods, and the plants are notoriously picky about their growing conditions, requiring humidity, frequent rainfall, and sufficient soil drainage. When they do become productive, the trees yield an annual harvest of 20 to 30 pods, which take four to five months to grow and ripen. Each pod contains between 40 and 50 cacao beans that have to be extracted, fermented, and dried before use — making the creation of a pound of chocolate a pretty arduous process!

You can try to b*llsh*t me about fine Belgian or Swiss chocolate, but the cacao bean is originally from the Amazon.  And who produces the most?  The Ivory Coast supplies 30 percent of the world’s total cocoa, leading the rest of the world by over half a million metric tons with a total crop of 1,448,992 tonnes. Companies like Nestle and Cadbury receive much of their cocoa from the Ivory Coast and Cocoa alone is responsible for almost two-thirds of the trade revenue coming into the nation.

When I was in Ecuador, they claimed to be the largest supplies of chocolate.Ecuador’s cocoa industry is one of the world’s oldest: in the Ecuadorian Amazon, archaeologists recently discovered traces of cocoa in pottery more than 5,000 years old. This long history is honoured today, with the nation’s total output weighing in at 128,446 tonnes.

Ecuador’s production of cocoa cannot match the global cocoa superpowers in West Africa in terms of gross output, but many chocolate connoisseurs feel Ecuador is tops in terms of quality. While many multinational companies turn to Africa for the base of their processed chocolate treats, smaller artisan chocolatiers look to Ecuadorian cocoa to provide the complex tastes they crave.

Since you seem to enjoy these wine facts, here are some more to whet your palate.

 We now have 10,500 wineries in the U.S.  That’s a 50% increase since 2009.  45% of those wineries produce fewer than 1,000 cases of wine each and only 72 wineries produce more than 500,000 cases. There are wineries in all 50 states—California is home to the most (4,613) and Hawaii the fewest with three.

“I hover over the expensive Scotch and then the Armagnac, but finally settle on a glass of rich red claret. I put it near my nose and nearly pass out. It smells of old houses and aged wood and dark secrets, but also of hard, hot sunshine through ancient shutters and long, wicked afternoons in a four-poster bed. It’s not a wine, it’s a life, right there in the glass.”—Nick Harkaway, author, The Gone-Away World

Verjus, basically, is grape juice — typically made from pressing slightly underripe wine grapes before they get too sweet. (It’s an elision of the French vert jus, or green juice.) If you have any verjus in your home, it’s probably in your kitchen cabinet alongside your vinegars and oils; verjus’ sweet-tart harmony is great for salad dressings.

Viva Les Veuves!

The history of Champagne is liberally sprinkled with the success of larger-than-life women, many of them widows. Unlike many women in the early 19th century, widows (veuve, in French) enjoyed the independence necessary to run a business. While unmarried women were dependent on their fathers or brothers and married women were forced to rely on their husband’s money, widows were allowed to own property and businesses and control their own finances.  In fact, the Champagne Widows were so successful that some Champagne houses without their own widow added “Veuve” to their labels anyway!  Some of the most famous widows and their iconic Champagne houses include:

Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin Clicquot –
Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin

Louise Pommery – Pommery

Mathilde Emilie Laurent-Perrier –
Laurent-Perrier

Elisabeth “Lily” Law
de Lauriston-Boubers Bollinger –
Bollinger

A word or two about port:

It has been 200 years since the founding of W. & J. Graham’s, one of the top Port producers.  Brothers William and John Graham started the company in 1820 and it remains independently owned by a single family—the Symington family.  Graham’s is renowned for an outstanding range of Aged Tawny Ports, Vintage Ports and Quinta Vintage Ports.  The Graham’s 1970 Vintage Port (which is still available on the market and costs a fraction of what it should) is thought by many to be one of the greatest Ports of the twentieth century.  And I love a good port!

The dark green wine bottle was an English invention, the work of Sir Kenelm Digby (1603-1665). Previously wine had been kept in goat skin bags.