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Meanwhile, the Brazilians had got into the act. In 1727, a Lieutenant Colonel Francisco de Melo Palheta came to arbitrate a border dispute between the French and the Dutch colonies in Guyana. By all reports, he did his job well, but while he was at it, he shacked up with the wife of the Governor of French Guyana. When Palheta departed, the lady saw him off with a bouquet containing hidden coffee cuttings and fertile seeds.
In 1773, Americans threw coffee and tea overboard to protest English taxes on the nation, bringing about The Boston Tea Party and spurring a revolution. In Europe at the same time, Prussia’s Frederick the Great tried to block imports of green coffee to stop Prussia’s economy going south. He needn’t have bothered, for the public outcry that ensued soon proved impossible to bare and he revoked the ban.
Fast forward 120 years and the local roasting shop and coffee mill is a commonplace sight in most western cities – that is, until Hills Bros. begin packing roast coffee in vacuum tins, destroying the roasting shop industry for all but a few large companies in the process. A year later, in 1901, instant coffee was created by Japanese-American chemist Satori Kato in Chicago, and two years after that, a German coffee importer, Ludwig Roselius, decides to see if a batch of ruined coffee beans can be turned into something useful by his researchers. They notice the caffeine has been removed by the water that ruined the beans, and the decaffeinated product is soon marketed as Sanka.
In 1971, Starbucks opened its first store in Seattle’s Pike Place public market. By 1995, Starbucks had become a pop culture reference, with a store on every block, and, in some cases, every corner. From 1995 to 2000, coffee consumption skyrockets once more, rising a whopping 700%. The price paid to growers drops, in the same time, by over 50%, due largely to competition from Asian growers and predatory buying practices.
The popular theory is that coffee was really ‘discovered’ by a sheep herder from Caffa Ethiopia. The herder was known as Kaldi, and he happened to notice that his sheep would get hyperactive after eating red "cherries” from the plant we now know to be coffee. Intrigued as to what the plant was doing to his flock, Kaldi tried a couple himself, and was soon in a caffeine frenzy. Initially, the local monks scolded Kaldi for his new found drug, but they soon found that if they took some coffee themselves, the monks could stay up later for their prayers- or so the story goes.

Views: 423 | Added by: Alla | Rating: 5.0/1
Total comments: 2
Alla says:
tongue
30.11.2012 at 14:13
Alla says:
The price paid to growers drops, in the same time, by over 50%, due largely to competition from Asian growers and predatory buying practices.
30.11.2012 at 14:12
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