COFFEE FACTS

In 1932, Brazil couldn’t afford to send its athletes to Olympic Games being held in Los Angeles. Not wanting to let its athletes down, the government devised a plan to load a ship with 50,000 pounds of coffee and have the 69-member Olympic team serve as crew and sell the cargo at ports between Rio and L.A. to finance their trip. Coffee sales were so poor, they only made enough money for 24 athletes to be able to participate in the Games.

‘Cappuccino’ takes its name from the Capuchin friars: the colour of the espresso mixed with frothed milk was similar to the colour of the Capuchin robe. The Capuchin friars are members of the larger Franciscan orders of monks, and their order was founded in the 16th century in Italy.

The word espresso comes from Italian and means “expressed” or “forced out”. Espresso is made by forcing very hot water under high pressure through finely ground, compacted coffee.

It’s said that coffee was discovered by Kaldi, a goat herder, in Ethiopia in the 1500s. Kaldi saw his goats eating coffee cherries. He later observed a change in their behavior, acting as though they were dancing. They had a high amount of energy and didn’t sleep at night. The herder shared his findings with local monks who then realized the coffee cherries could help them to stay up all night and pray. They spread the word to other Ethiopian monks and soon it reached across the civilized world.

Kopi Luwak (also known as civet coffee), is one of the world’s most expensive luxury coffees. It’s made from partially digested coffee cherries, which have been eaten and defecated by the Asian palm civet. The cherries are fermented as they pass through a civet’s intestines, and after being defecated with other fecal matter, they are collected.

Kopi luwak is produced mainly on the Indonesian islands of Sumatra, Java, Bali, Sulawesi, and in East Timor.

Black ivory coffee from Thailand is another of the world’s most expensive coffees. It’s a type of arabica coffee that comes from the dung of elephants. Handpicked coffee cherries are fed to the elephants, mixed with other foods such as bananas and rice. 33 kg of raw coffee cherries results in only 1 kilogram of the finished product. Most of the beans are not recoverable as they are chewed by the elephants, become fragmented, or are lost in the bush after being excreted. Only 215kg of black ivory coffee was produced in 2021.