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In Italy, around 1600, priests asked Pope Clement VIII to forbid the favourite drink of the Ottoman Empire considering it part of the Infidel threat. On taking one sip, the pope found the drink delicious and baptised it - making it an acceptable Christian beverage. In 1674 The Women's Petition Against Coffee was set up in London. Women complained that men were never to be found at home during times of domestic crises, since they were always enjoying themselves in the coffee houses. They circulated a petition protesting "the grand inconveniences accruing to their sex from the excessive use of the drying and enfeebling liquor". A year later, King Charles II tries to supress the coffee houses because they were regarded as hotbeds of revolution but his proclamation is revoked after a huge public outcry and the ban lasts just 11 days. Some of the coffee houses in London became very well known with different groups of workers and soon became the kingpins around which the capital's social, political and commercia l life revolved. Jonathan's Coffee House in Change Alley was where stockbrokers usually met - it eventually became the London Stock Exchange. Likewise, ship owners and marine insurance brokers visited Edward Lloyd's Coffee House in Lombard Street - it too moved on and up in the world and became the centre of world insurance and the headquarters of Lloyds of London. Johann Sebastian Bach composed his "Kafee-Kantate" or Coffee Cantata in 1732. Partly an ode to coffee and partly a stab at the movement in Germany to prevent women from drinking coffee (it was thought to make them sterile), the cantata includes the aria "Ah! How sweet coffee tastes! Lovelier than a thousand kisses, sweeter far than muscatel wine! I must have coffee..." Prussia's Frederick The Great attempted to block imports of green coffee in 1775 as Prussia's wealth is drained. He condemned the increase in coffee consumption as "disgusting" and urged his subjects to drink beer instead. He employed coffee smellers, who stalked the streets sniffi ng for the outlawed aroma of home roasting. Public outcry changes his mind. Coffee fever spread throughout Europe in the 18th Century and the French had introduced coffee into the New World by 1715. Coffee consumption in Britain began to decline as import duties for coffee increased. The British East India Company concentrated on importing tea as the market began to grow. In Europe, however, people were gradually inventing new and improved ways of making coffee and, in 1822, a Frenchman Louis Bernard Rabaut invented a machine which forced the hot water through the coffee grounds using steam instead of merely letting it drip through. The first espresso machine had been born. Coffee is believed to have arrived in North America in 1607 when Captain John Smith helped to found the colony of Virginia at Jamestown. By 1668 coffee had replaced beer as New York City's favourite breakfast drink with coffeehouses in New York, Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia and elsewhere. Most of these coffeehouses were more like pubs and taverns than the genuine coffeehouses of Europe. They served not only coffee but also chocolate, ales, beers and wines. They also rented rooms to sailors and travellers. One famous coffeehouse in New England was the Green Dragon in Boston. At first it was popular with British officers but in later years it came to be the gathering place of John Adams, Paul Revere and other revolutionaries plotting against England. Tea remained the favourite beverage in America until 1773 when the people of Boston revolted against the excessively high tax King George had placed on tea. They raided English merchant ships which were in the harbour and threw their cargoes of tea into the sea. The event became known as the "Boston Tea Party", and afterwards the people of Boston and America changed from drinking tea to coffee which was seen as a patriotic duty. It was the Dutch, however, who, with a coffee plant smuggled out of the Arab port of Mocha, became the first to transport and cultivate coffee commercially in 1690. They founded the East India coffee trade by taking the coffee tree to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and their East Indian colony, Java, and as a result, Amsterdam became a trading centre for coffee. Coffee was becoming a precious product fit for Royal gifts and, in 1714, the mayor of Amsterdam sent a young coffee tree to King Louis XIV of France as a present. Strip picking means the entire crop is picked in just one pass. Selective picking is, obviously, more expensive and is usually only used for arabica beans. It does, however, produce the best results. During the harvest season, whole families turn out and all the hands - men, women and children - join in the work. The Colonos, as the coffee pickers are called in Brazil, carefully select only the fully ripened fruit for a second, third, or fourth visit over the four to six month harvest season. On an average coffee farm, the pickers may gather between 100 and 200 pounds of coffee cherries per day. Of this total weight only 20 percent is coffee bean. Industrial proces sing must begin immediately after the fruit is harvested, to prevent the pulp from fermenting and deteriorating. The coffee beans can be prepared for roasting in one of two ways. The oldest, simplest, and cheapest, is the dry method. This produces so-called 'Natural' coffees and is adopted mostly in Brazil and Western Africa. Firstly, the harvested cherries are usually sorted and cleaned to separate the unripe, overripe and damaged cherries and to remove dirt, soil, twigs and leaves. This can be done by winnowing, which is commonly done by hand, using a large sieve. Any unwanted cherries or other material not winnowed away can be picked out from the top of the sieve. The ripe cherries can also be separated by flotation in washing channels close to the drying areas. The harvested cherries are then spread out, in the sun, on large concrete or brick patios or on matting raised to waist height on trestles. They are raked to avoid fermentation and to expose them evenly to the sun's rays. If it rains or the temper ature falls considerable, the cherries have to be covered for protection. Alternatively, after two or three days, coffee can be put in drying rooms, where it is dried by the heat of a burner at 45-60 degrees C. It can take up to four weeks for moisture content of each cherry will have fallen to the optimum 12 percent of their original amount. The outer shell will have become dark brown and brittle. The cherries are then stored in large silos where they are able to continue to lose moisture. The drying operation is the most important stage of the process, since it affects the final quality of the green coffee. A coffee that has been overdried will become brittle and produce too many broken beans during hulling (broken beans are considered to be defective beans). Coffee that has not been dried sufficiently will be too moist and prone to rapid deterioration caused by the attack of fungi and bacteria. The other method of preparation is the wet method. It produces so-called 'Washed' or 'Mild' coffees and is adopte d in Central America, Mexico, Colombia, Kenya and Tanzania. This involves more capital outlay and more care than the dry method. It does, however, help to preserve the intrinsic qualities of the bean better, producing a green coffee which is homogeneous and has few defective beans. Hence, the coffee produced by this method is usually regarded as being of better quality and commands higher prices. The main difference between the wet and dry methods is that the wet method removes the pulp from the bean within 12-24 hours of harvesting instead of allowing the cherries to air dry. The beans are separated from the skin and pulp by using a pulping machine which squeezes the cherries between fixed and moving surfaces. The flesh and the skin of the fruit are left on one side and the beans, enclosed in their parchment covering, on the other. The clearance between the surfaces is adjusted to avoid damage to the beans. The lighter, immature beans are then separated from the heavier, mature beans through specially desi gned washing channels or by shaking the beans through a strainer into a tank of water. The beans are then stored in fermentation tanks for up to two days during which time the slimy layer of the cherry is separated from its parchment like covering by natural enzymes. The length of the fermentation process is based on the condition of the beans and the climate's condition. When the altitude is low, the fermentation time is short. At higher altitudes, the fermentation can take up to 48 hours. The coffee is then washed in huge quantities of water (about 100 litres for 10 kilos of coffee). It must then be dried so that it retains only about 10 percent moisture.
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