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The other day I received an alarming notice from the California State Bureau of Coffeeblogging. They were concerned that I had not posted a coffee-related item to Jonathan's Coffeeblog since August of 2007. Had I not posted a cafe-related item in January of 2008, my Coffeeblogging license would already have been revoked. I was in deep trouble, and there was only one way out of the mess: post something to Jonathan's Coffeeblog having to do with coffee, and post it fast. And so, here it is: the subject of today's Coffeeblog post is cappuccino.
Ethiopian Coffee
- 12:38 PM Monday, August 27, 2007
[From the place where all coffee started.]
I call this a Coffeeblog, and yet I haven't written about coffee since April 12, more than four months ago. I'm in danger of having my coffeeblogging license revoked by the State Bureau of Transportation and Communication, so I'd better write something about coffee and write it now. But what? How much can a guy say about coffee? Then I remembered that Peet's serves a different coffee every day, so I could just bop into the El Cerrito Peet's and leave the choice of topic up to the gods. The gods, and Peet's, didn't disappoint me. They chose Ethiopian Fancy, coffee from the place where all coffee started. As a beverage, that is. And that was a good choice, since Ethiopia is a very interesting place....
Just how important is coffee to the functioning of the blogosphere? Very important, one would think. But that would only be idle speculation. Now it is possible not just to think, but to know, on a case-by case basis, thanks to Twitter and Twitterverse. As blogs have multiplied into the tens of millions and become more bloated and complex there is a trend in the reverse direction towards microblogging, based on the design principle of economy, less is more. Twitter, an extremely popular service created by a company named Obvious, enforces the "less" part of the principle by limiting the length of blogposts to 140 characters. That's what I was hinting at when I posted this item about Twitter in late March. In addition to the 140-character limit, the Twitter folks request that every update posted be an answer to the question "what are you doing right now?" Most Twitter members respect that request most of the time. And there is an extraordinary presence of the "movers and shakers" of the blogosphere and of the Web 2.0 world among avid Twitter updaters....
If Bees Drank Coffee
- 8:00 PM Sunday, March 18, 2007
[Delexa's coffee website popularity ranking.]
The ease with which Internet communication can aggregate the opinions of many millions of human individuals has brought about a renewed interest in what is being called the Hive Mind. An ancient Utopian ideal which goes back even before Plato's Republic and Sparta, the Hive Mind is a major theme in science fiction. The many websites which tally popularity lists, most notably Digg.com, have created the notion of a planetary, or at least species-specific human Hive Mind, which is now instantly accessible....
In 1587, a writer named Abd al-Qazir Al-Jaziri wrote a history of coffee, under the title Umdat al safwa fi hill al-qahwa. The Arabic word qahwa, said to mean both "coffee" and "wine", is the root of our word "coffee," through the Turkish word kahve, as referenced in this bilingual website. The standard story of coffee is that it originated in Ethiopia, was traded across the Red Sea to Yemen through the port of al-Mukha (Mocha, get it?), whence it made its way up the shipping routes to Mecca and Medina, and from there to Cairo, Constantinople, Vienna, Paris, Italian towns, and London. Since this all happened during the period just prior to release of Abd al-Qazir Al-Jaziri's book, one would like to read it, or at least a translation....
It's time to activate the Coffee page link in the navigation bar and the "Go" sidebar. (After all, this is the Coffeeblog). My grand plan is to add a lot more items about coffee and its history, characteristics, producers, consumers, and their ilk to the new Coffee Page, as well as the home page. (There is already a "Cafes" page where the coffeehouse-related articles are listed.)...
When was the last time you were at Starbucks and either 1) had sex or 2) heard rock and roll? Never, right? So what is the common thread that links these three phenomena of contemporary culture? More than you might think....
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