That Coffee Roasters: How Coffee Drinking Became a Culture

lunes, 7 de agosto de 2017

How Coffee Drinking Became a Culture

Coffee drinking today is almost considered a ritual of relaxation and a moment of inner peace.

With the passage of time, there have been many changes in the way we behave and live. Many things have evolved in these last years, but overall we haven’t changed that much compared to how we were centuries back. In fact, there’s a culture that’s been ongoing for millennia that spins around one little green bean: coffee.

Coffee has persisted in our lives, shaping the very roots of history itself. This beverage of ancient times is a drink associated with social interaction, intelligence, and business even. Curiously, many thinkers and politicians back in the day found the answers to essential questions while having a sip of coffee.

Coffee plants are from way back in time, but the discovery of coffee’s true potential wasn’t until the 1400s when people found out they could roast its seeds. After that, coffee took a huge step and paved its way into history.

It was only one century after that the drink widespread across Arab’s coffeehouses. Europe didn’t take that long to be filled up with this beverage; business turned coffee into a successful one. This is where coffee became more than a drink, but an opportunity for social interaction and brainstorming of ideas.

Coffee, as a mood booster, was the ideal drink for writers and composers to create their works, and most coffeehouses were spectators of the birth of classics we enjoy up to this day.

For Americans, history proves to be somewhat different. Word says that back in 1773, just after the Boston Tea Party, American colonists raided British ships and trashed all crates of tea. This is said to be the moment they universally switched traditions and started drinking coffee.

John Adams, an American patriot and the second President of the United States, has an interesting story to tell us about coffee. Extracted from a letter to Abihail Adams on July of 1774, he wrote the following words “… Accordingly, I have drunk coffee every afternoon since and have borne it very well. Tea must be universally renounced. I must be weaned, and the sooner, the better.”

But it wasn’t all smoothly in the history of coffee; there’s a very dark tone to it that still can be felt today. Europeans took their coffee along with them while they colonized several parts of the world. This means they forced the enslaved to grow coffee on their lands.

Sadly, this meant that the very same coffeehouses that were supposed to elevate thinking and consciousness served the French and American Revolutions to occur. It feels counterproductive that slaves were the ones behind the mass production of coffee their slave owners would be drinking.

But it didn’t last enough, for the relief of many. With the passage of time and modernism, ideas of slavery were looked as orthodox, but coffee continued to be produced worldwide. Today, when drinking a cup of coffee, you might look back and think how long it has been and how much we’ve changed. Coffee hasn’t, yet it stands forth.

Every time you feel immersed in thought, take a long sip of your dark beverage and be grateful for the opportunity. Should you seek for the best beans to produce high profile coffee, then I’d recommend you contact That Coffee Roasters. Their tradition might not be of millennia, but the quality of their beans will definitely take you back.