COFFEE is a beverage, served hot or with ice, prepared from the roasted seeds of the coffee plant. These seeds are almost always called coffee beans.
There are two main species of the coffee plant, Arabica and Robusta. Coffee Arabica was first cultivated on the Arabian Peninsula. Robusta, which contains about twice as much caffeine, can be cultivated in environments where arabica will not thrive. Compared to arabica, robusta tends to be more bitter. Good quality robustas are used as ingredients in some espresso blends to provide a better "crema" (foamy head), and to lower the ingredient cost. In Italy many espresso blends are based on dark-roasted robusta.
Arabica coffees were traditionally named by the port they were exported from, the two oldest being Mocha, from Yemen, and Java, from Indonesia. The modern coffee trade is much more specific about origin, labeling coffees by country, region, and sometimes even the producing estate.
ESPRESSO (Italian) is a flavorful coffee beverage brewed by forcing hot water under high pressure through finely ground coffee. Espresso was invented and has undergone development in Italy since the start of the 20th century, but up until the mid 1940s it was a beverage produced solely with steam pressure. The invention of the spring piston lever machine and its subsequent commercial success changed espresso into the beverage we know of today, produced with between 9 and 10 atmospheres, or bar of pressure.
As a result of the high-pressure brewing process, all of the flavors and chemicals in a typical cup of coffee are concentrated. Because of its intense and highly concentrated ingredients (including caffeine) espresso lends itself to mixing into other coffee based drinks, such as lattes, cappuccinos, macchiatos, and mochas, without the need to overly dilute the resulting drink.
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