A Quick Look at the Black & Decker DCM2500B

There are a few different ways to make your morning cup of coffee, you can just use instant coffee of course, but I am talking about different ways to use actual ground beans. You can use a French press which is the more manual way to do it, or you can use a percolator, or a vacuum brewer which is apparently still very popular in Italy for the quality of the coffee produced, you can use a pod coffee machine where you just put in a sealed pod of coffee and use that to brew with, or you can use a drip coffee maker which is probably the most common type used today.

The drip coffee machine, also known as a dripolator apparently (but that does sound like some sort of invention by a mad scientist from a cartoon so maybe avoid using that term), works by heating the water in a metal tube which then rises up into plastic tube, into what looks like a showerhead over the coffee, and then the heated water comes out and passes through the ground coffee, through the filter and into the waiting mug or carafe where it is kept warm using a heating plate as usually multiple cups are made at once.

True coffee connoisseurs would probably turn their nose up at a drip coffee machine as it doesn't give the kind of control that allows for you to bring out the best in the beans you are using, but for most people who just want a good, strong cup of coffee in the morning then they are perfect.

The mysterious history of coffee has long been the stuff of legend and myth. The story begins, possibly, in Ethiopia, with Kaldi, the most famous goatherd of all time. Kaldi, it is said, noticed that his goats began to jump and dance after they consumed the bright red berries of the coffee plant. He tried nibbling the berries himself and noticed that he too felt like dancing.

Kaldi took the berries to a nearby monastery, where a holy man disapproved of their use and threw them into the fire. Then, for the first time, man smelled the aroma of roasting coffee! The beans were rescued from the coals and soon brewed into a drink. A similar story is told with the Yemenite Sufi mystic Shaikh ash-Shadhili as hero. However, Homer, and many Arabian legends, tell of a bitter black beverage being drunk in Africa in even earlier times.

What is more certain is that coffee was taken from the central highlands of Ethiopia to the Arabian penninsula, where it was growing in Yemen by about 1000 A.D. Coffeehouses became popular in the Arab world and coffee was soon imported into Italy. The first coffeehouse in Istanbul opened in 1554, and coffee was available in Venice about 1570. However, the Arabs were careful not to let viable coffee beans leave their control, requiring them to be boiled or parched before departure.

The Dutch are usually credited with being the first to cultivate coffee outside of Arabia. In 1616 they smuggled a fertile coffee plant out of Yemen and grew it in a greenhouse in Holland. They may have been preceeded by the Indian Sufi Baba Budan, who encountered coffee on a pilgrimage to Mecca about 1600. It is said that he smuggled seven viable coffee beans out of Arabia via Yemen by taping them to his belly.

The Dutch made several attempts to cultivate coffee in India, but had little success until they took seedlings to Java, in what is now Indonesia. Cultivation there was wildly successful, and spread to Celebes and Sumatra.

In 1715, the mayor of Amsterdam gave a coffee plant to Louis XIV of France, which the king had planted in the Royal botanical garden in Paris. In 1723, a cutting from this plant was transported to Martinique, where it became the foundation of the coffee industry throughout the Caribbean, Central and South America.

From these beginnings, coffee became widely available during the later 17th and 18th centuries. More than 3000 coffeehouses operated in England by 1675. Today, coffee is a multibillion dollar crop cultivated around the world.