Welcome to Black as Midnight - The Site for Coffee Lovers

Here you will find a wealth of information on coffee through our articles and resources on beans, specialty coffees, coffee and food, roasting, grinding, and much more!

Featured From Harvest Coffee Cider to Cafi d'Amour, Coffee Recipes that will Spice up Your Holiday Season Everyday, millions of Americans start their morning with a freshly brewed cup of coffee. Whether you take it with cream and sugar, or prefer it black, sipping on a blend of coffee beans is a ritual that graces household after household. But this holiday season, while entertaining or just cozying up by a warm fire, adding a little spice to your coffee concoctions will leave you and your guests begging for another cup.

Coffee - A History of Adventure Around The World

Beer may be the oldest man-made brew, with wine a distant second. Beer recipes are at least as old as 6000 BC, but the oldest winemaking processes date 'only' from about the turn of the first millennium.

Their younger cousin, coffee, arose a few hundred years later, though no one knows how old the plant itself is. Some archaeological evidence shows that humans were eating the berries as long ago as a hundred thousand years.

One legend says that a goat herder in Ethiopia observed his charges eating the red berries from a nearby tree and became excited. Trying them himself, he too felt a great lift. By 600 AD that magical berry, and the brew made from drying and grinding its seeds, had found its way to what is now Yemen, on the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula.

Stories tell of a native of India smuggling the precious seeds of the tree out of Arabia around 1650 AD, then planting them in the hills of Chikmagalur. Arabian law forbad the exporting of beans that could germinate, effectively controlling coffee trade for centuries. Whether myth or history, the fruit of those seeds now forms a third of India's large coffee output.