Fifteen More Coffee Facts

Coffee is the second largest traded commodity in the world (oil is the largest).

1. There are two types of oils in coffee, good oils and bad oils. The good oils are good for your body and your health, the bad oils may give you ulcers and stomach problems. To avoid the bad oils in coffee use paper filters to minimize the effects.
2. Mocha Java Coffee has no chocolate in the Mocha or Java bean. Mocha is the name of the port in Yemen, where all African coffee beans are traded and transported. Java is the name of an island in Indonesia where the Java bean originates. Both coffees are dark bean and provide a bold coffee, when you mix the two together you get Mocha Java coffee.
3. Coffee starts out as a yellow berry, ripens into a red berry, and is then harvested by hand. Through water soaking process the red berry is de-shelled and leaves the green coffee bean. This bean then dries in the sun for 3-5 days before bagging.
4. In Africa, coffee beans are soaked in water mixed with spices and served as candy to chew.
5. Brazil is the largest coffee producer in the world and the US is the largest coffee consuming country in the world.
6. There are 65 countries in the world that grow coffee and they are all located along the equator.
7. Black coffee with no additives contains no calories.
8. There are two types of coffee plants, Arabica and Robusta.
9. Espresso Coffee has one third of the caffeine content of a cup of regular coffee.
10. James Mason invented the coffee percolator on December 26, 1865.
11. Instant coffee was invented in 1901 by a Japanese American chemist, Satori Kato. In 1906 English chemist, George Constant Washington claimed he invented instant coffee.
12. Melitta Bentz a housewife from Dresden, Germany, invented the first coffee filter in 1908.
13. It takes five years for a coffee tree to reach full maturity, coffee trees can live up to 100 years and the average yield from one tree equals about one pound of roasted coffee.
14. A regular 6oz cup of coffee contains about 150 milligrams of caffeine.
15. Robusta coffee beans have twice as much caffeine as Arabica beans, but are of less quality.

German Inventions

Although it has now been replaced by the Celsius temperature scale in almost all countries except for USA and Belize, Fahrenheit (in which water's freezing point is 32 degrees and boiling point is 212) was the world standard until relatively recently. It was invented by German physicist Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit in 1724.

Aspirin, made from willow bark was developed by Felix Hoffmann in August 1897 for pharmaceutical giant Bayer, and although a US company claimed a patent for the drug after World War One, 12,000 of the 50,000 tons of Acetylsalicylic acid (Aspirin) produced each year are still made by Bayer.

After using blotting paper from her children’s school books to remove unwanted coffee grounds, Dresden housewife Melitta Bentz had the idea to patent her invention in 1908. She then founded a company selling over a thousand coffee filters by the next year.

German clock manufacturer Junghans Uhren Gmbh developed a watch that automatically adjusts itself to an atomic clock using radio signals. It was invented in 1990 and will remain accurate to the second for at least a million years.

The first true working car was invented by Germans Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler in 1886, 22 years before the Model T Ford went into production in the USA.

The first true accordion was invented by a German, Christian Friedrich Buschmann. In 1822 he attached bellows to a portable keyboard with vibrating reeds and called it a "hand-aeoline".

In 1977 after nine years of development, German inventors Jürgen Dethloff and Helmut Göttrup created the first card with a built in programmable microprocessor, the ancestor of the chip and PIN cards in our wallets today.