MORE than 7,000 years ago, people living in the Middle East discovered that they could ferment grapes to make wine. The yeast that they unknowingly harnessed for the process can now be found in every vineyard on the planet. As with wine, the processing of coffee beans and cacao, used to make chocolate, also requires some fermentation. But new research shows that coffee and cacao yeasts are far more genetically diverse than wine strains. This opens up the intriguing possibility of imparting entirely new tastes to the terroir of coffee and chocolate.
Cacao originated in the Amazon and was widely cultivated in Central America before Hernán Cortés brought it to the Old World in 1530. Coffee moved in the opposite direction. From Ethiopia it was disseminated throughout the Middle East by Arab traders during the 6th century and ultimately arrived in the New World during the 18th century, where nascent Americans may have seen drinking it as something of a patriotic duty after the Boston Tea Party.
As Europe’s thirst for coffee and chocolate grew, merchants keen to cash in on the crops started establishing vast plantations wherever the plants could be cultivated. In the first part of the 17th century, Dutch traders transported a Yemeni coffee plant to Holland. Shortly thereafter, they began cultivating its descendants in Sri Lanka and on Java and RĂ©union. Over...Continue reading
Source: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1RMQyKN
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