Coffee Corner

The dreamy steam of freshly brewed dark roast rises into the air, causing every taste bud on your overused tongue to tingle and stand on edge. The sagging membranes in your head begin to hover and come alive with the first few sips of this delicious drop. Coffee seems to cover every need these days, from sunrise to sunset, a pool of black prescribed for your overworked soul. Coffee has played a crucial role in many societies. The energizing effect of the coffee bean plant is thought to have been discovered in the northeast region of Ethiopia, and the cultivation of coffee first expanded in the Arab world. The earliest credible evidence of coffee drinking appears in the middle of the 15th century, in the Sufi monasteries of Yemen in southern Arabia. From the Muslim world, coffee spread to Italy, then to the rest of Europe, to Indonesia, and to the Americas. In East Africa and Yemen, it was used in religious ceremonies. As a result, the Ethiopian Church banned its secular consumption, a ban in effect until the reign of Emperor Menelik II of Ethiopia. It was banned in Ottoman Turkey during the 17th century for political reasons, and was associated with rebellious political activities in Europe. An important export commodity, coffee was the top agricultural export for twelve countries in 2004, and it was the world's seventh-largest legal agricultural export by value in 2005. Some controversy is associated with coffee cultivation and its impact on the environment. Many studies have examined the relationship between coffee consumption and certain health conditions; whether the overall effects of coffee are ultimately positive or negative has been widely disputed. The method of brewing coffee has been found to be important to its health effects. This sound uses the following file from Freesound: http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=121871