Coffee

Coffee drinking has become a way of life for many of us and has replaced some of the more traditional drinking habits of many countries. Many of the countries of Europe that have been historically been tea drinking nations have found that coffee is rapidly replacing tea as the nation’s favourite drink.

Coffee has had a brief spell of mass popularity before, back in the 1970′s and 1980′s when coffee percolators were all the rage people bought into the fashion for coffee, trying to emulate some of their more refined and cosmopolitan European cousins by drinking fresh coffee. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your opinion of coffee percolators their time was only ever going to be a brief one as the coffee that they produced was nothing like that which you would find in an Italian or French café as well as being quite difficult to master.

So after a brief interlude during these years where coffee was the fashionable hot drink to have at home, helping you and your family to look more sophisticated, the focus drifted back to tea drinking. It was during this time that the market exploded for instant coffee, which had been around for many years previous but had only been a very small market. There was certainly a growth in the popularity of coffee during the percolator years during which many people decided that they preferred the taste of coffee to that of tea. These people wanted all of the flavour of good coffee but without all of the hassle of setting up the coffee percolator every time they wanted a fresh tasting cup of coffee.

This is where the instant coffee wars began. It seemed for a while that every other advertisement on the television was for one brand of instant coffee or another, with each brand trying to out do the other by adding a high flying celebrity to their advertising campaign. Some brands, which are today seen as inferior coffee brands, spent millions upon millions of dollars on raising the profile of their brand, and this advertising certainly worked.

For many years instant coffee was a staple purchase for many families in their weekly shop, again eating into the sales of tea. The instant coffee market was growing at a huge rate year on year but as with every market things had to move forward to ensure that the growth was sustained. It was now that the home filter coffee machine was introduced to the market.

The idea of filter coffee machines was simple, add freshly ground coffee into a cone of filter paper at the top of the machine through which boiling water was slowly filtered, leaving the used grinds in the filter paper and the water / coffee to pour down into a collecton jug that was sat on a hot plate to keep your freshly brewed coffee hot for ever if you so wished.

These machines were very popular indeed, taking the place of the percolator in many peoples kitchens but even though these machines were much easier to operate than a percolator people soon got fed up with them. By this time people really knew what good fresh coffee should taste like so the instant coffee people started to experiment to see if they could get the fresh coffee taste into an instant coffee.

This challenge is still going on but with the massive growth in the number of small coffee shops in towns and the fact that so many fast food chains now sell very good fresh coffee people are moving away from the instant brew. Coffee is massive business, you only have to try to count the number of different Starbucks type coffee houses that you have been to in the last year to try to get some idea with how the explosion has affected society, coupled with this you also have the new wave of home coffee machines that have appeared in shops which are as near to good tasting coffee made at home as we have ever had.

Coffee looks like it is here to stay, who knows when or if ever this current wave of popularity will start to slow down but it appears as though we all might appreciate what exactly a good cup of coffee is.

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Author: Harwood E Woodpecker
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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With the large multi-national coffee companies focused purely on coffee as a commodity rather then a drink to be savoured, it allowed a new sector to emerge in the coffee industry: Speciality Coffee. Speciality coffee was nothing new, rather the opposite; it stripped coffee making back down to the grass roots: pure arabica beans, roasted long enough for the coffee to fully develop all its characteristics and flavours.

During the ‘Dark Age’ of coffee there was still excellent coffee available, if you knew where to look for it. A number of small cafes and shops continued to trade, sourcing and roasting high quality arabica beans. These outlets were typically run and frequented by immigrants (usually Arabs, Turks, Greeks and Italians), far from the mainstream.

All this began to change in the 1960s, with the post World War II ‘Baby Boomers’ coming into adulthood. Many of this generation were keen not to follow in their parents footsteps, preferring to act in a more bohemian way. For them, these cafes and shops were an ideal place to meet, read poetry, take drugs and experience alternative culture.

One such coffee shop in Berkeley (California) is widely credited as being the main inspiration on the emergence of the speciality coffee sector. Peet’s Coffee & Tea store, opened in 1966 by Alfred Peet (dubbed the ‘grandfather of speciality coffee’), enthused a number of its customers, who later became key players in the speciality sector. Peet, an immigrant from Alkmaar (Holland), had developed a distinctive style of roasting coffee from working in his family’s coffee and tea business. After emigrating to California, aged thirty-five, he opened his shop employing his artisan coffee roasting techniques to build a loyal customer base. Peet’s coffee was so loved that he even had his own set of groupies: the ‘Peetniks’.

Two of Peet’s most important customers (historically) were a couple of Seattle coffee lovers named Jerry Baldwin and Gordon Bowker. In 1971, after tasting Peet’s fine brews, they were inspired to open their own coffee shop back in Seattle called Starbucks. Starbucks opened as a bean-only-store, steadily building a loyal customer base during the 70s and early 80s through its fine arabicas and darker roasts.

In 1984, the director of retail operations and marketing, Howard Schultz, tried to persuade Baldwin and Bowker to open the first Starbucks coffeehouse. Schultz had just returned from a trip to Milan, where he had noticed the existence of coffeehouses on almost every block. These were not just places to enjoy great espresso coffee, but also served as meeting places. Schultz was keen to recreate this kind of coffeehouse in America, but Baldwin and Bowker rejected Schultz’s plans as they were unwilling to get into the restaurant business.

Undeterred, Schultz left Starbucks in 1985 to open his own coffeehouse, ‘Il Giornale’. Still using Starbucks coffee beans to make espresso drinks, Il Giornale proved extremely popular with the Seattle public. So popular in fact() that, in 1987, Schultz was able to buy Starbucks from Bowker and Schultz. Changing Il Giornale’s name to Starbucks, Schultz began to rapidly expand, opening over 1,000 stores in a decade.

The story of the first British speciality coffeehouse also involves Alfred Peet. In 1995, Scott and Ally Svenson wanted to open a coffeehouse in Covent Garden, London. Their background was in marketing and design and, even though they were originally from Seattle, they did not know much about coffee. This is why they approached Steven Macatonia and Jeremy Torz of Union Coffee Roasters. Steven and Jeremy had fallen in love with coffee while working at Peet’s in California. On their return home they decided to open their own roasting outlet and were soon supplying places such as the River Café, the Caprice, and the Ivy.

The Covent Garden coffeehouse, named the Seattle Coffee Company, was another big success and inevitably expansion soon followed. The rapid growth of the company caused increasing demand on Union Coffee Roasters, so the two companies decided to merge together. In 1998, after opening over 60 outlets throughout the UK, Starbucks came knocking at their door. They saw the acquisition of the Seattle Coffee Company as an ideal way to enter the UK market. Soon the Seattle Coffee Company was no more, with all its stores re-branded as Starbucks.

The popularity of coffeehouses has been phenomenal. Almost every high street in Britain has a least one coffeehouse now. Words such as espresso, cappuccino and café latte are commonplace. In fact the price of a café latte is now one of the products that the British government use to measure inflation. Market analysers believe that the success of the coffeehouse is not solely due to the coffee they serve, but the atmosphere in which it is served. Coffeehouses in Britain in the 1990s were a break from convention. In the consumerist landscape of the high-street, coffeehouses represented a place to relax. Customers were encouraged to take their time over their coffee; sit on big comfy sofas; offered the daily newspapers to read; allowed to idle the afternoon away watching the world go by. In other words, coffeehouses had returned to playing their original role in society, as they had done when they first arrived in Britain back in 17th Century.

The growth of these coffeehouses has helped to heighten the public’s awareness of the speciality coffee sector. Increasingly, individuals are looking to have a slice of the coffeehouse in their own home, investing in espresso makers and other coffee accessories. Coffee is now widely available from a multitude of origins, roasted to differing degrees and ground to your requirement. In short, the ‘Dark Age’ of coffee is well and truly over.

James Grierson is the owner of Galla Coffee: http://www.gallacoffee.co.uk – Uk online retailer of designer coffee accessories. Through the Coffee Knowledge section of his website he aims to help people understand more about coffee and give them tips on how to make great tasting coffee in their home.

Check out http://www.gallacoffee.co.uk/acatalog/Coffee_Knowledge.html for more articles or if you have a question send it to: coffeeknowledge@gallacoffee.co.uk

Author: James Grierson
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Pressure cooker

There are many different coffee makers available in the marketplace to choose from. One of them is the Bunn Coffee maker. The Bunn Coffee Maker is made by the Bunn-O-Matic Corporation. The Bunn-O-Matic Corporation was founded in 1957 and they are credited with introducing the first paper coffee filter. Over the years the company has evolved and started making commercial beverage equipment and, more recently, home coffee brewers. There are seven different types of Bunn Coffee brewers available which include; My Café Brewer. My Café Brewer brews one cup of coffee at a time. The Bunn coffee makers take pride in brewing coffee at home that matches the standards of the expensive restaurant cups of coffee. They have a stainless steel tank with an advanced spray head, which dissipates the water over the coffee, and a very effective hot water heater. The coffee machines are either black or white with a stainless steel trunk which allows them to blend with any of the home décor styles. The decanter on most of the machines can hold up to ten cups of perfectly brewed coffee. Bunn also makes the BCG Grinder for pre-grinding your coffee beans.

The Bunn Advantage claims that Bunn Coffee makers brew coffee that is robust in flavor without the common bitterness encountered with some coffee machines. Bunn Coffee makers do this by using a patented system that keeps the temperature at the ideal brewing temperature of 2000 Fahrenheit. The coffee maker has a fast brew cycle which exposes the water to the ground coffee beans for the perfect length of time for a perfect coffee flavor. The Bunn Coffee maker creates the right amount of turbulence via its spray head to suspend the ground coffee and extract it’s flavor uniformly for the perfect cup of coffee.

How to Use a Bunn Coffee Maker

Start with a good quality coffee that has been well stored. The coffee maker requires one tablespoon of ground coffee for one brewed cup. Use good clean odorless water preferably water that has been filtered. If you need to keep your coffee for more than 30 minutes store it in a thermal carafe; it can hold its flavor here for up to 60 minutes. Clean your decanter after every use, even the faintest trace of old coffee can taint your fresh pot.

Bunn Coffee maker replacement parts can easily be obtained from vendors and from the manufacturer. Parts for the Bunn coffee maker are easily accessible. On the companies website you can find access to customer service representatives who can answer your questions and help find the replacement part or accessory that you need. Bunn coffee makers are available at many different locations. You can purchase your coffee maker online at the different sites of the coffee makers distributors. There are Bunn coffee makers and replacement parts available on the different auction sites online; this allows you to purchase your coffee maker at a discounted price.

Eric Comforth is a consultant who writes on many consumer topics. Learn more about coffee makers at Coffee Maker Central

Author: Eric Comforth
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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