The Art of Brewing a Cup of Joe (Coffee)

What is the best method for brewing a cup of coffee? How did you learn to make a cup of coffee? Did you learn to make the coffee from your mother or your father? Was this a skill passed down like shaving or working on a motor vehicle! Brewing a great cup of coffee is considered by some to be a skill above all others skills we have. Most men and some women don’t even know how to brew a great cup of coffee. They just follow the direction on the bag and hope for the best. 

But let’s take this into consideration, the bag or can of coffee you buy from your local supermarket. How long that bag or can of coffee sat in a warehouse before it was shipped out to the supermarket to be sold. Is it still fresh or has the coffee beans started to break down giving you the coffee drinker a bitter taste instead of a great cup of coffee? How where these coffee beans processed for your bag or can of coffee? Did they use pesticides during the growth of the coffee cherries? Was there any chemicals used during the processing of the coffee?

Now let’s look at signal origins coffees like Brazilian Coffee,  Costa Rican Coffee,  Hawaiian Coffee,  Mexican Coffee,  Colombian Coffee,  Ethiopian Coffee,  Jamaican Coffee. All these coffees our considered to be Gourmet Coffees or Coffee from around the World. They are grown on plantations and then shipped out around the world. Most of these coffees will end up and specialty coffee shops. There is good news for you that there are online sites that also specialize in bring you the consumer these special coffees for your enjoyment. These sites will let you choose the grind in which you want your coffee shipped to you. I have been drinking Honduras ‘Silver Hills’ coffee from CoffeeGiftsMagic, I order it in the Drip Grind so I could use it in my signal cup Keurig, it makes a good cup of coffee.

But we are here to learn how you make a great cup of coffee. Over the past few months I have tried many different ways to making a great cup of coffee. The Drip Grind, French press Grind, and the Espresso Grind is the easiest way to get your coffee beans done for you if you don’t have your own coffee grinder. All these grinds make a good cup of coffee. But to me the best cup of coffee I ever had was when my sister took whole coffee beans and placed them in her personal coffee grinder and grinded the beans right before making the coffee.

The taste of the coffee was so refreshing and the aroma in the room was unbelievable to my senses. I started to look forward to the morning cup of coffee again. Heck I could of just survived on coffee during my vacation if I had too. To me that was one Great Cup of Coffee. We tried two different coffees that week all from CoffeeGiftsMagic.com, we had Highlander Grogg and Peppermint Patty Flavored Coffee. 

My sister told me the best way to buy your coffee was in Whole Bean so you could have the freshest cup of coffee, because when using a coffee grinder you are releasing the oils that are still inside the whole coffee bean, if you get your coffee pre-grind, those oils start drying up after they have been grounded.

There are two types of coffee grinders on the market today. There is the blade grinder which consist of a signal blade that slices your coffee bean, it does not give you a consistent grind, but it does do the trick. And then there is the Burr Grinder which usually has several different setting so you can choose your own grind. From very fine grind to very coarse grind depending on how you are making your coffee. The Burr Grinder varies in price from $50.00 all the way up to a couple of thousand dollars. For home use a Burr Grinder right around $200.00 is a rather good price for a quality piece of equipment.

The Burr grinder will crush the whole coffee bean and releases more of the oils within the coffee bean, unlike its brother the blade grinder which just slices the coffee bean. The Burr by far is my choice for grinding whole coffee beans. You get one Great Cup of Coffee (Joe).

CoffeeGiftsMagic has all of your needs for Coffee from Around the World, we also have Decaffeinated Coffee, Flavored Coffee, Espresso Coffee, Organic Coffee, and Coffee Blends. We bring you these coffees at a great price and will ship right to your front door. Come and take a look around our site. Hope to see you soon.

The Holiday Season is once again approach us!

The holiday season is once again approach us, this is the time of year we spend time with our families and friends. We get to sit back and reflect on the past year. Sometimes we have had a great year and sometime the year just did not ever get off the ground for us. And then there are the times when we just can’t wait to see what the next year will bring us.

We all have hopes and dreams how our life is going to play out for us during the year. Sometimes we lose love ones along the way to death or they just decide to move on and their plans don’t include you anymore.

I know from my own life that the biggest happiest part of the Holiday Season was always spending time with family and friends. Although the holiday season is always fast moving and you feel like you are being pulled into several different directions during the holiday season and there are times when you wish that it was all over so you could just return back to your simple quiet life.

When I was growing up my parents always made sure us kids had everything we needed for Christmas, we celebrated the holiday with the best of them. As we grew up and became adults, we still celebrated Christmas, but to us Christmas was never about the gifts we gave each other it was always about the love we had for each other. The time we got to spend together with our family.

As we all gather this holiday season like we have for several years now not on Christmas Day. Because my siblings all have families of their own now. We will share a holiday meal together and we will talk and tell stories of years past while drinking a cup of coffee, egg nog, or hot chocolate.

When you are trying to decided what to get your family or a special friend for Christmas. Remember the greatest gift in life will always be love which is free. But if you want to get them something they can use or might like to have CoffeeGiftsMagic has a wide selection of Gourmet Coffees and Teas.  We have a selection of Flavored Coffee, Gift samplers Collections, and Hot Chocolate.

Timeline: Coffee History

850: First known discover of coffee cherries; Legends tell us that members of the Galla tribe in Ethiopia notice that they got an energy boost when they ate certain berries. They would ground up the berries and mix them with animal fat. Another Ethiopian legend suggest a goat herder Kaldi noticed his goats eating certain berries became friskier after eating the red berries from local shrubs. Kaldi, himself experiments with the berries and finds that he himself has more energy.

1100: The first coffee trees are farmed on plantations. The Arab traders begin to boil the beans and created a drink called ‘qahwa’ which means (that what prevents sleep) also known as the wine of Islam.

1453: Coffee was introduced to Constantinople by Ottoman Turk. The world’s first coffee shop is opened. Turkish law makes it legal for women to divorce her husband if he fails to provide her with her daily quota of coffee.

1511: The Governor Khair Bey of Mecca, bans coffee fearing that its power might promote resistance to his rule. The coffee trade is shut down in Constantinople. But only after one week-long reign of terror the sultan decided that coffee was blessed and the governor was executed.

1600: Coffee enters Europe through the port of Venice, (the first coffee house opens in Italy in 1683). Coffee is introduced to the West by Italian traders. Pope Clemente VIII was advised to outlaw the Muslin brew. Pope Clemente VIII, decided to baptize the drink, stating it would be a sin, not to let everyone enjoy this wonderful beverage. Why should only the pagans drink it! Pope Clemente’s baptism of coffee propelled its spread across Europe.

1607: Coffee is introduced to the New World by Captain John Smith, founder of Jamestown in Virginia.

1652: The first coffeehouse was opened in England. But women were not allowed inside unless they were there to serve the men. Many women wrote petitions to get this law changed but they were refused. Edward Lloyd’s coffeehouse opened in 1688, it later became Lloyd’s of London, the world’s first insurance company. The word ‘TIPS’ was coined in English coffeehouses; a sign reading “To insure Prompt Service” TIPS was placed by a mug. Those wanting a better seat or fast service would throw a coin into a tin.

1672: The opening of the first Parisian café Le Procope dedicated to serving coffee.

1713: King Louis XIV was presented a coffee tree from the Dutch. It is believed that sugar was first used as an additive by his court.

1718: The Dutch transport coffee from Java to Dutch Guyana in South America. Coffee plants are introduced into the Americas for the first time for farming. 

1721: The first coffeehouse opens in Berlin.

1727: The Brazilian coffee industry has been sparked by a love affair. The love affair started by smuggling a few seedlings out of Paris. A Brazilian coast guard officer was attracted to the wife of the Governor of French Guyana. He requested that she supply him with a few seedlings that were afterwards grown in Brazil. Founding the production that has dominated the world trade for 200 years. (By 1800, Brazil had become the world’s largest producer of coffee.)

1730: The British introduced coffee to Jamaica.

1750: One of Europe’s first coffeehouses, Café Greco, opens in Rome.

1763: Venice has over 2,000 cafes.

1773: The Boston Tea Party makes drinking coffee a patriotic duty in America.

1779: Coffee plants shipped from Cuba to Costa Rica.

1790: Mexico was given coffee plants to start farming them.

1813: The first coffee is grown in Hawaii by Don Francisco de Paula Marin. He was an advisor to King Kamehameha I, he was the first person to farm pineapple and coffee in Hawaiian Islands. (Not a lot of records about coffee in Hawaii until 1823).

1822: The first prototype of an espresso machine was created in France.

1823: Chief Boki accompanied King Kamehameha II and his wife on a royal visit to London for an audience with King George IV. King and Queen Kamehameha had both contracted measles, a disease unknown to the Hawaiian people, as a result of the disease the King and Queen had died. Chief Boki returned to Hawaii on the British warship HMS Blond, he carried some Arabica coffee trees to Hawaii, which he acquired in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on his way home with the bodies King and Queen Kamehameha. But these coffee trees never produced any coffee.

1828: Reverend Samuel Ruggles brought some trees from the Manoa Valley on Oahu to the Naole area on the Big Island. This area is now known as the Kona District. These plants thrived and by 1878 Kona was producing 150,194 lbs. of coffee and was listed as the 13^th largest coffee production area in the world. (Today Hawaii has over 6500 acres of coffee being farmed on all of the major Hawaiian Islands with annual production between 6 to 7 million pounds).

1865: James Mason invents the coffee percolator.

1878: Coffee is introduced to the British colonies in East Africa.

1885: Roasting coffee by using natural gas and hot air becomes the most popular method.

1886: Joel Cheek, a former wholesale grocer names his popular coffee blend ‘Maxwell House’ after a hotel in Nashville, Tennessee where it is served.

1901: The soluble coffee (instant) was invented by Japanese-American chemist Satori Kato of Chicago.

1901: Luigi Bezzera files a patent for the first espresso machine.

1903: German coffee importer Ludwig Roselius turns a batch of ruined coffee beans over to researchers, who prefect the process of removing caffeine from beans without destroying the flavor.

1905: The first commercial espresso machine is manufactured in Italy.

1906: English chemist George Constant Washington invented instance coffee while living in Guatemala. He noticed a powdery condensation forming on the spout of his silver coffee decanter. After some research, he created the first mass production of instance coffee.

1907: In less than a century, Brazil accounts for 97% of the world’s coffee beans harvested.

1920: Prohibition in the United States, Coffee Sales Boom!!!

1933: Dr. Ernest Illy develops the first automatic espresso machine. At the same time Alfonso Bialetti invented the world’s first stovetop espresso maker, which later becomes the most popular maker in Italy.

1938: Having a surplus of coffee in Brazil, Nestle Company invents freeze-dried coffee. Which is named Nescafe and is introduced in Switzerland.

1942: During World War II, American soldiers are issued Maxwell House coffee in their rations kits. Back home, wide spread hoarding leads to coffee rationing.

1945: Achilles Gaggia enhances the espresso machine with a manual piston that creates a high pressure extraction to produce a thick layer of cream.

2013: CoffeeGiftsMagic, joins the coffee race on the Internet. Bringing Coffees from around the World to you. All of our coffees are roasted the same day they are shipped out. We have Brazilian coffee, Costa Rica coffee, Hawaiian coffee, Colombian coffee, Ethiopian coffee, Jamaican coffee, and many more for your enjoyment.

Do you like flavored coffee, we carry a wide selection of flavored coffees. We have Espresso, Decaf coffee, and Organic Coffee.

If coffee is not your thing we also carry a wide selection of Gourmet Tea, we have black tea, green tea, flavored teas, Tisanes tea, and Herbal teas.

We just started to offer Gourmet Hot Chocolate for those who prefer chocolate to coffee or tea.

Come and visit us at coffeegiftsmagic.com, we will leave the light on for you.