The first time coffee was mentioned in European literature. Leonhart Rauwolf of Augsburg, Germany, traveled through the orient from 1573-1576 and discovered coffee in Aleppo, Syria. In his travel log, he was the first European to write about coffee as a beverage.
Coffee arrived in Germany at about the same time and the first German coffee house opened in 1673 in Bremen. Four years later, a second one was established in Hamburg; the beverage quickly spread from the maritime trade centres throughout the whole of Germany. The first coffeehouse opened in 1721 in Berlin. The oldest existing coffee house. The oldest coffee house which still exists today is the "Bremer Kaffeestube" located in Schuetting, Germany. It opened in 1700.
During the 18th. century coffee-house culture flourished in Germany, too. It became a growing habit to meet over coffee and biscuits. Musicians often gave small public concerts in coffee houses. One of the conductors of musical performances of this type was Johann Sebastian Bach. His famous Coffee Cantata was first performed in a coffee house in 1732.
The Prussian state was as strict with the desirable beans as Yemeni rulers had been hundreds of years before: the import and roasting of coffee was a made a state monopoly. Smugglers thought up the most absurd tricks to bring it across the border. They are said, for example, to have carried the coffee across the border in coffins, pretending that they contained relatives who had died of leprosy. Out of fear of the disease, Customs officers kept their distance and let the coffins past, along with three to four hundredweight of coffee.
During the years of huge inflation in Germany in the 1920s, the price of a pound of coffee rose to three billion marks. In the second world war, import restrictions paralysed the coffee market completely. It was just such deprivations, however, that helped to make coffee the symbol of freedom and enjoyment that it is today!
The first attempts to produce caffeine-free coffee by using an organic solvent were made in 1900. However, it was Ludwig Roselius of Germany who had the innovative idea to soak the green beans with water steam before extraction in order to make the caffeine soluble. This method was patented in 1905. The first decaffeinated coffee was marketed by "Kaffee Hag" of Germany in 1906 and became a worldwide success.
By 1906, the first instant coffee (thanks to Englishman George Constant Washington) is created, a feat to be soon duplicated by Maxwell House and Nestle. Maxwell House sent their packages of instant coffee overseas with the GIs in WWII, hooking a generation on the stuff. Except for those lucky enough to taste espresso and its variations while in Europe, bringing back the machines and skills necessary to fuel the rebellions of the Beat generation.
Melitta Bentz
Melitta Bentz was a housewife from Dresden, Germany, who invented the first coffee filter. She was looking for a way to brew the perfect cup of coffee with none of the bitterness caused by overbrewing. Melitta Bentz decided to invent a way to make a filtered coffee, pouring boiling water over ground coffee and having the liquid be filtered, removing any grinds. Melitta Bentz experimented with different materials, until she found that her son's blotter paper used for school worked best. She cut a round piece of blotting paper and put it in a metal cup.
On June 20th, 1908, the coffee filter and filter paper were patented. On December 15th, 1908, Melitta Bentz and her husband Hugo started the Melitta Bentz Company. The next year they sold 1200 coffee filters at the Leipziger fair in Germany. The Mellitta Bentz Company also patented the filter bag in 1937 and vacuumpacking in 1962.
No comments:
Post a Comment