Test Your Coffee Knowledge with the CoffeeMeister

by Erin Meister, Posted Aug 12th 2009 @ 3:00PM

Photo: Erin Meister

Erin Meister trains baristas for North Carolina-based Counter Culture Coffee and sporadically maintains the blog Meet the Press Pot from her home in New York City. This is part of a series of tips for the caffeine-addicted.

There are a lot of awesome jobs out there, but if I may say so, I think I've got one of the best: Getting paid to taste, learn and teach about coffee. (Great for the palate, maybe not so great for a night's sleep.) But as much as I've been able to learn while busily caffeinating New York City, there's always more to be discovered. Coffee's so fascinating, it could be its own Trivial Pursuit category. I thought I'd share five of the best facts I've picked up along the way about our favorite little buzzin' bean, for you to wow your coffee-loving friends with.

5. Espresso has less caffeine than a cup of drip coffee ... sort of. A 7-ounce cuppa joe averages about 150 mg of caffeine, while a 1.5- to 2-ounce shot of espresso yields roughly 100 mg (data varies from source to source). But yes, strictly speaking, drip coffee does have more caffeine per total volume -- but not per ounce. Espresso wins that round, hands down.

4. Coffee is one of the most complex things we consume. Clocking in with nearly 1,000 aromatic compounds (and more being discovered all the time), coffee runs laps around even red wine, which contains about a third as many.

Three more after the (jittery) jump!

Green coffee beans, ready to be roasted. Photo: Erin Meister

3. An arabica (high-grown, generally higher-quality) coffee bush has a lifespan of 100 years or more, but typically doesn't start producing until it's about 5 years old. (I wonder how old a coffee bush gets before it starts being embarrassed to be seen in public with its parents.)

2. Coffee had to go around the world before arriving in Kenya -- and not in 80 days. Despite being discovered in neighboring Ethiopia as early as the 9th century, coffee wasn't planted or harvested in Kenya until 1893. Before arriving there, the precious plants were brought to Yemen; through the Ottoman Empire; up to Italy by Venetian traders; to India and Indonesia; by the Dutch into the New World; and finally doubling back into Kenya.

1. A lot of the coffee family tree is actually a single bush. In 1714, a Dutch official presented France's King Louis XIV (a coffee fanatic) with the gift of one coffee bush, called the Noble Tree, which the king lovingly kept in the world's first greenhouse. It's from this one tree that most of the heirloom coffee strains grown in Central and South America originated from, as clippings were brought and cultivated first in the French colonies, and then spread like gangbusters by later travelers, adventurers and bean heads.

Do you have a favorite factoid about coffee? How many of these trivial bits did you already know?

Filed Under: Lists, Drink Recipes
Tags: coffee, coffee facts, coffeemeister, erin meister, ErinMeister, facts, lists, the coffeemeister, TheCoffeemeister, trivia

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Reader comments (Page 1 of 1)

8-27-2009 @9:58AM Ben Boon said... Thank you for this post, i love coffee and i enjoy reading interesting facts so it’s a perfect combination for me. I found this coffee facts post whilst surfing the web you may be interested to read.

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8-27-2009 @10:12AM Ben Boon said... link: http://www.rogersestatecoffees.co.uk/cremapress/2009/08/gourmet-coffee-roasting-facts/
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9-10-2009 @8:35PM webslave said... I too love coffee, the wife and I both Must have our coffee.
We usually order order the good beans in 5 lb packages. But, we also drink what the general population drinks too.
What I've noticed from the good coffee and the bad, is the aftertaste the cheaper coffee's leave.
I enjoy a a strong cup o Moca Java with less acidity.
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