Coffee Facts You Might Just Not Find At Starbucks!

Wow - what a plain title I hear you say!

Sorry, I am trying to create 30 100 word powerblogs by May 01, 2009! So here goes... My friends all say I can talk about anything under the sun (or the hind legs off a sick donkey!) I'll leave you to be the judge of that!

So here we are fishing for my first topic...

Let's talk about coffee, shall we? How much does anyone really know about coffee? First of all, it is grown all over the world, usually in hot places. (I.e. British coffee beans don't exist, or at least you won't find any called British, nudging shoulders with bags of beans from exotic places like Kenya, the Goald Coast or Java!)

Now that's out of the way, isn't it strange that although you don't see much coffee being grown in Britain, they sure drink a lot of it... Much more than say twenty years ago. Reason being is that they have improved their catered coffee over 700% since then. Gone are the days of the transport cafe, where a cup of "brewed" coffee was a mug of steamed milk with pretend coffee essence stirred in out of a bottle with the brand name "Camp" on it!

I can feel a blog about the Global Village coming on, but don't hold your breath. That's next!

OK, so to carry on, the coffee used to (after they ditched the stuff out of the bottle and started getting particular about how the powdered stuff would taste) be split into "arabica" and "robusta" beans. The difference was in the taste. The "robusta" beans had a coarse earthy taste to them and really lacked the delicate pungency of the "arabica" beans. Then the coffee importers would use so many parts "robusta" to so many parts "arabica."

To cut a long story short, we are all spoiled for choice now. British coffee drinkers can get their coffee from Costa or Starbucks. And the choice is no longer restricted to which brew is ordered, since the coffee can be created as a traditional Italian-style blended drink, along with the shots of expresso-made coffee added to it to create a perfect "Caffe Macchiato" (spotted coffee, rather like the spotted cow, really!)

I won't bore you with the rest. You can go to a Starbucks and just read the wall...

Happy coffee drinking! See you all on the flip-side for Powerblog #2!