Some interesting facts about coffee and tea

The country in the world where they drink the most coffee is Finland, with a consumption of 12 kg per year. The country where they drink the least is Puerto Rico, with 400 grams of coffee per person.

The country in the world where they drink the most tea is Turkey, with a consumption of 3.13 kg per person. The one where they drink the least is Mexico, with 15 gramms.

Coffee spread to Europe in the 17th century as the "wine of Arabia". The first people to bring this product were Venetian merchants, close to Istanbul, which at that time was the capital of the Ottoman Empire.

Tea also spread to Europe in the 17th century. People say that tea was imported to the old continent by Dutch and Portuguese merchants, which contributed to the spread of a beverage that the Chinese had known about for 5.000 years.

The great German composer Johann Sebastian Bach loved coffee so much he dedicated a song to it: the Kaffeekantate, performed in Leipzig between 1732 and 1735.

Tea bags date back to 1904 and were invented by mistake: Thomas Sullivan, a tea merchant, used silk bags to send samples to his customers. These customers mistakenly thought that the bags were intended to replace the traditional metal infusers.

The most expensive coffee in the world is produced in Thailand and is called Black Ivory Coffee. To produce it some elephants are fed with coffee beans; after the beans are ejected naturally, they are washed and minced. Through this "process" people say that the coffee gets a sweet chocolate-like aroma and a kilogram can cost 1600 Euros.

The most expensive tea in the world is produced in China and doesn't have a name yet, but will costs $ 150,000 per kilo. The name of its inventor is An Yanshi and he is a professor at the University of Sichuan. Why is it so special? The plants are fertilized exclusively with panda dung.

After oil, steel, grain, coffee occupies the fourth place in importance in the scale of international trade.

Because of the high cost of transport, towards the end of the 17th century in England the cheapest tea came to cost seven shillings per pound, which corresponded to the weekly pay of a worker.

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