The Coffee Portal

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Coffee is a beverage brewed from roasted coffee beans. Darkly colored, bitter, and slightly acidic, coffee has a stimulating effect on humans, primarily due to its caffeine content. It has the highest sales in the world market for hot drinks.

The seeds of the Coffea plant's fruits are separated to produce unroasted green coffee beans. The beans are roasted and then ground into fine particles typically steeped in hot water before being filtered out, producing a cup of coffee. It is usually served hot, although chilled or iced coffee is common. Coffee can be prepared and presented in a variety of ways (e.g., espresso, French press, caffè latte, or already-brewed canned coffee). Sugar, sugar substitutes, milk, and cream are often added to mask the bitter taste or enhance the flavor.

Though coffee is now a global commodity, it has a long history tied closely to food traditions around the Red Sea. The earliest credible evidence of coffee drinking as the modern beverage appears in modern-day Yemen in southern Arabia in the middle of the 15th century in Sufi shrines, where coffee seeds were first roasted and brewed in a manner similar to how it is now prepared for drinking. The coffee beans were procured by the Yemenis from the Ethiopian Highlands via coastal Somali intermediaries, and cultivated in Yemen. By the 16th century, the drink had reached the rest of the Middle East and North Africa, later spreading to Europe. ( Full article...)

The following Wikimedia Foundation sister projects provide more on this subject:

• World Coffee Research – a 501 (c)(5) nonprofit program of the international coffee industry. (Wikipedia article: World Coffee Research)
• Coffee Research Foundation – based in Kenya, and founded in 1908
• Central Coffee Research Institute – based in Chickmagalur District, India, and founded in 1915