There are a wide variety of beverages on the market today, but the main daily beverages are tea from Asia, cocoa from South America and coffee from Africa. Among the three world-famous beverages, the annual sales of coffee reach more than 3.5 million tons, which is 3 times that of cocoa and tea, ranking first among the world's three major beverages.
Coffee is an evergreen shrub and small tree of the rubiaceae family native to tropical Africa. Wild coffee trees can grow to 5 to 10 meters tall, but the coffee trees planted in the manor are cut to a height of less than 2 meters in order to increase the amount of fruit and facilitate harvesting.
Every year during the harvest season, the branches of the coffee tree are covered with bunches of red coffee berries, and the fruit contains two seeds, which is often referred to as coffee beans. After the seeds are washed, roasted and further crushed, they become powdered coffee for drinking.
The English name of coffee is a transliteration of the Arabic word "kafa". Kaffa is a southern Ethiopian province in Africa and is generally considered to be the home of coffee.
As early as 4,000 years ago, the Agao people, who live in the southwestern highlands of Ethiopia, have been growing and using coffee.
There has long been a local story that one day, a shepherd herds herded her flock to a strange place to graze herd. On a small hill, the sheep ate a small red fruit on a small tree, and after returning in the evening, the sheep was unusually normal in the pen, not as serene and docile as usual, tame and calm, but excited, restless, screaming, and even jumping all night, the owner thought that the sheep had eaten what grass poisoning, several times got up and lit up to look closely, but saw the sheep in good spirits, jumping around alive, not like the appearance of poisoning pain.
The next morning, the shepherd prepares to herd to graze the sheep in another place. After opening the fence, the sheep ran desperately to the hill with small red fruits, and no matter how the shepherd whipped and stopped, it was useless. The shepherd was exhausted and had to follow the sheep to the hill.
The shepherd was very strange to see that each sheep was scrambling to eat the little red fruit, so he picked some small red fruit to chew and taste, and found that this small red fruit was sweet with some bitterness. When the herding returned, the shepherd felt so excited that he could not sleep all night, and even wanted to dance with the sheep. The magic of the little red fruit soon spread, and ethiopian shepherds went around picking the little red fruit and chewing it, and taking it to the market to sell. Later, this small red fruit developed into the most popular coffee drink in the world today.
Coffee from the Kaffa region has long been shipped by caravan to the Middle East. In the 13th century, the Arabs had already drunk coffee, when coffee was introduced to the mountains of Yemen, and coffee was widely cultivated in the Middle East around the 16th century.
In the 17th century, coffee cultivation also spread to Southeast Asia, Latin America and other parts of Africa. Java in Indonesia was the first region in Southeast Asia to grow coffee, and coffee also entered South America from Java, then from Brazil to Colombia in the 18th century, and by the beginning of the 19th century, Java replaced Yemen as the world's main supplier of coffee at that time.
Today, Brazil is the world's largest coffee producer, accounting for about 1/3 of the world's annual production, while Colombia occupies the second place.
Coffee contains protein, fat, crude fiber, sucrose, caffeine and other ingredients, which have the effect of refreshing people, diuretic and strengthening the heart, helping digestion, and promoting metabolism.
According to studies, long-term moderate drinking has the function of restoring youth, and it also has a good effect on children's hyperactivity syndrome. Therefore, it is an ideal drink suitable for both family and restaurant drinking, and is becoming more and more popular in the country.
But it is worth noting that drinking too much coffee is harmful to the human body. Because the main ingredient in coffee is caffeine, a cup of coffee contains 100 to 150 mg of caffeine. Caffeine can be refreshing, but 10 grams of caffeine is enough to kill an adult.
Therefore, drinking a lot of coffee in a short period of time will make people at risk of poisoning. Long-term drinking of coffee, will make the human body dependent on caffeine, once stopped drinking, it will make the brain highly inhibited, there is a decrease in blood pressure, severe headaches and other symptoms; some even manifest as mental abnormalities, moody, turbulent, melancholy, indifferent and other symptoms.
Drinking coffee without restraint will also bring some other side effects, such as caffeine can increase the serum cholesterol value, the proportion of people who often drink coffee suffers from coronary heart disease is 1 times higher than that of people who do not drink coffee; pregnant women who drink coffee every day, the baby born has low muscle tone, poor limb mobility, and drinking coffee after drinking alcohol will aggravate the damage of alcohol to the human body; smoking while drinking coffee will cause excessive brain excitement. In short, drinking coffee in moderation is beneficial to the human body; uncontrolled indiscriminate drinking is harmful to the human body.