Kona Cowboy Coffee: May 2013

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

MORE COFFEE PROHIBITION

A contemporary example of religious prohibition of coffee can be found in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.The organization holds that it is both physically and spiritually unhealthy to consume coffee. This comes from the Mormon doctrine of health, given in 1833 by founder Joseph Smith in a revelation called the Word of Wisdom. It does not identify coffee by name, but includes the statement that "hot drinks are not for the belly," which has been interpreted to forbid both coffee and tea.

Quite a number of members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church also avoid caffeinated drinks. In its teachings, the Church encourages members to avoid tea and coffee and other stimulants. Abstinence from coffee, tobacco and alcohol by many Adventists has afforded a near unique opportunity for studies to be conducted within that population group on the health effects of coffee drinking, free from confounding factors. One study was able to show a weak but statistically significant association between coffee consumption and mortality from ischemic heart disease, other cardiovascular disease, all cardiovascular diseases combined, and all causes of death.

For a time, there had been controversy in the Jewish community over whether the coffee bean was a legume and therefore prohibited for Passover. Upon petition from coffeemaker Maxwell House, the coffee bean was classified in 1923 as a berry rather than a bean by orthodox Jewish rabbi Hersch Kohn, and therefore kosher for Passover.

Some folks say that the Kona Cowboy Coffee Company’s four brands of gourmet coffees are certainly on their way to becoming spiritual! You’ll get a great cup of joe with PANIOLA 100% Kona Cowboy Coffee, grown on Hawaiian volcanoes and roasted in the Rocky Mountains … the one with no bitter aftertaste and no acidity. CAFÉ PINON de Nuevo Mexico is the Southwest’s favorite with pinion nuts and a perfect way to improve your coffee experience during the day. And our MOKA-JAVA is a medium dark roasted blend of Indonesian and Ethiopian coffees that just might be high octane! We also make COWBOY ACTION COFFEE, the Official Coffee of the Single Action Shooting Society!

The purpose of this blog is to unite Kona coffee lovers and perhaps learn a little about coffee and all the benefits of coffee at the same time. Join up, become a member, comment and have fun! You can find the Kona Coffee Fiends group on Facebook and we’d appreciate it if Facebook users would “LIKE” the Kona Cowboy Coffee Company page at www.facebook.com/pages/Kona-Cowboy-Coffee-Company/222070817858553. Just copy and paste to your browser. You can also find us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/jackshuster. And on the web at www.KonaCowboyCoffee.com to order your gourmet coffee and coffee products.

You know you’re a coffee fiend when your eyes stay open when you sneeze! So enjoy your coffee, make it Kona, and remember, Kona is the home of the Hawaiian cowboy…and we had cowboys in Kona before there were cowboys in Texas!

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

COFFEE PROHIBITION

Coffee was initially used for spiritual reasons. At least 1,100 years ago, traders brought coffee across the Red Sea into Arabia (modern-day Yemen), where Muslim dervishes began cultivating the shrub in their gardens. At first, the Arabians made wine from the pulp of the fermented coffee berries. This beverage was known as qishr and was used during religious ceremonies.

Coffee drinking was prohibited by jurists and scholars meeting in Mecca in 1511 as haraam, but the subject of whether it was intoxicating was hotly debated over the next 30 years until the ban was finally overturned in the mid 16th century. Use in religious rites among the Sufi branch of Islam led to coffee's being put on trial in Mecca: it was accused of being a heretical substance, and its production and consumption were briefly repressed. It was later prohibited in Ottoman Turkey under an edict by the Sultan Murad IV.

Coffee, regarded as a Muslim drink, was prohibited by Ethiopian Orthodox Christians until as late as 1889; it is now considered a national drink of Ethiopia for people of all faiths.

Its early association in Europe with rebellious political activities led to Charles II outlawing coffeehouses from January 1676 (although the uproar created forced the monarch to back down two days before the ban was due to come into force). Frederick the Great banned it in Germany in 1777 for nationalistic and economic reasons; concerned about the price of import, he sought to force the public back to consuming beer. Lacking coffee-producing colonies, Germany had to import all its coffee at a great cost.

A look at contemporary religious prohibitions next time.

You know you’re a coffee fiend when you're the employee of the month at the local coffeehouse and you don't even work there! So enjoy your coffee, make it Kona, and remember, Kona is the home of the Hawaiian cowboy…and we had cowboys in Kona before there were cowboys in Texas!

Tuesday, May 7, 2013

COFFEE SHAPES CULTURE!

Coffee is a powerful beverage, according to historian Mark Pendergrast, author ofUncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World. On a personal level, coffee helps keep us awake and active. On a much broader level, coffee has helped shape our history and continues to shape our culture.

Coffee plants grow wild in Ethiopia and were probably used by nomadic tribes for thousands of years, but it wasn't until the 1400s that people figured out they could roast its seeds. "Then it really took off. By the 1500s, he says, the drink had spread to coffeehouses across the Arab world. Within another 150 years, it took Europe by storm.

Coffeehouses became a spot not just to enjoy a cup but to exchange ideas. The insurer Lloyd's of London was founded hundreds of years ago in one of London's 2,000 coffeehouses, he notes. Literature, newspapers and even the works of great composers like Bach and Beethoven were also spawned in coffeehouses.

It is often said that after the Boston Tea Party of 1773, when American colonists raided British tea ships and threw crates of tea into the harbor, Americans universally switched over to drinking coffee. "There's a lot of truth to the story, I found," Pendergrast says. He cites a letter John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, in which the Founding Father proclaims his love of tea but says he will have to learn to embrace coffee instead, because drinking tea had become unpatriotic.

The Kona Cowboy Coffee Company’s four brands of gourmet coffees are certainly on their way to becoming historical! You’ll get a great cup of joe with PANIOLA 100% Kona Cowboy Coffee, grown on Hawaiian volcanoes and roasted in the Rocky Mountains … the one with no bitter aftertaste and no acidity. CAFÉ PINON de Nuevo Mexico is the Southwest’s favorite with pinion nuts and a perfect way to improve your coffee experience during the day. And our MOKA-JAVA is a medium dark roasted blend of Indonesian and Ethiopian coffees that just might be high octane! We also make COWBOY ACTION COFFEE, the Official Coffee of the Single Action Shooting Society!

You know you’re a coffee fiend when lick your coffeepot clean! So enjoy your coffee, make it Kona, and remember, Kona is the home of the Hawaiian cowboy…and we had cowboys in Kona before there were cowboys in Texas!