Cafe2U shares three fascinating coffee stories from history

In its most recent blog post, the mobile coffee franchise dove into the lengths that people have been willing to go to, across time, to achieve the perfect cup of coffee.

First established almost 20 years ago in 2004, Cafe2U has grown into a successful franchise network in the intervening years. In this time, bean experts working for the coffee van franchise have come across plenty of interesting coffee-themed tales - three of which were recently shared on the Cafe2U blog.

First to be explained was the fact that one of the tastiest, most expensive coffees in the world is actually made from elephant waste. Cafe2U said that one of the most “sought after coffees in the world is Black Ivory Coffee from Thailand, which sells for as much as $1,100 per kilogram and $50 per cup in some establishments”. Essentially, elephants consume Arabica coffee beans and their dung is then collected to create the Black Ivory, with the taste supposedly enhanced by elephants’ digestive enzymes breaking down the coffee’s protein.

Secondly, Cafe2U went into the fascinating history of the coffee filter. The franchise explained that, “Until roughly 100 years ago, if you were lucky, your coffee filters were made of cloth; if you were unlucky, you made use of whatever was to hand, such as a sock. However, even if you could afford cloth filters, they had a tendency to over-brew the coffee and make it taste bitter, so a new solution was required.” This was when Melitta Benz, a “German homemaker”, took a page out of her son’s school book “and filtered her morning brew through it” and “the paper coffee filter brewing system was born”.

Finally, the coffee van franchise revealed that until the 16th century, coffee was banned in Europe - and it only got approved with the help of the Catholic church. According to Cafe2U, “European Catholics, who were wary of the drink’s perceive Muslim background, [decried] it as ‘the bitter invention of Satan’.” Luckily, Pope Clement VIII sampled the drink and approved of it, and he “proclaimed that it was a Christian as well as a Muslim drink and that it would be a sin to let only pagans enjoy it”. Find out more about Cafe2U’s franchise network via the company’s profile page, which is linked above.