In comparison with time several decades ago there is less opportunity to find simple plain coffee. The real reason of that is huge amount of different coffee makers which can create massive varieties of coffee beverages. Nowadays that is fairly easy to prepare almost all kinds of coffee drinks at home and become your own barista. In most cases coffee maker, espresso machine, cappuccino gadget or your latte machine can create miracle in just a minutes as you don’t even need to spend a lot of time and efforts for process of making coffee.

This is a happening because of an obsession by coffee fans all over America for the gourmet or specialty coffee. These people visit all the coffee specialty stores and order it from catalogues or the Internet. They love roasting and grinding the coffee beans themselves. And when they take trips to such places like Costa Rica, they look for and bring back the specialty coffees. Now we have “coffee tasting” events much like wine tasting.

Coffee is one of the few untouched products over time but that is quickly changing. People are coming up with all sorts of ways to improve its flavor and aroma and will probably keep doing it well into the future. Coffee shares a good chunk of the world’s market. It is second only to oil in dollar volume as a world commodity.

People also these days are constantly trying to reduce their caffeine intake. A pound of coffee has half the caffeine as a pound of tea yet we get more caffeine in a cup of coffee? Why? It is because a pound of tea will give us 160 cups of coffee and a pound of coffee only gives us 40. This may disappoint those of you who have to drink decaffeinated coffee but hate the taste of it.

Also, it is interesting to note, that when you grow coffee at high altitudes, the result is less caffeine. This is probably one of the advantages of gourmet coffee in that it is grown at much higher altitudes than the standard grocery store blends. There are a variety of different types of coffee beans — too many for this writing. Some beans we will mention are:

You have Latte, Espresso, Low-Fat, Organic, Cappuccino, lightly-spiced Arabian with no filter, Cal, Decaf, Half-Decaf, Black Forest, Cappuccino, Cafe au Lait, Alpine which has brown sugar, a Spanish coffee bean meaning “with honey”: Caf‚ con Miel, and (Spanish for coffee with honey), and Cafe de Olla (which is sweet and made with chocolate).

Without overstatement we can say that coffee can give us real enjoyment if we decide to take this challenge to get to know and discover all available coffee tastes and varieties. Coffee with its many varieties can open for us absolutely other world. And we can be sure that this is amazing and exciting adventure which can take even all life time and wouldn’t become boring.

Tags: caffeine, coffee, coffee beans, coffee maker, espresso