The Brewspaper

Are you a fan of peanut paste? Perhaps you enjoy it on a sandwich, or with celery and carrot sticks. Maybe you’re one of those strange people who eat peanut butter with apple. Or maybe you can’t get past the first line of this article and are internally screaming, “It’s peanut butter, not peanut paste!” If you are like me, then you have probably gotten into an argument with someone about whether the proper term for peanut butter is peanut paste, or vice versa. I remember mentioning peanut paste in a conversation and one of the people in the circle said “Peanut paste? Why would you call it paste?” Well, there is actually a very good reason. In 1884, the Canadian chemist Marcellus Edson created and patented a type of paste created from peanuts, which he gave to people who had trouble chewing regular food. Around a decade later, in 1895, Dr. John Kellogg of cornflakes fame developed a more refined method for creating a similar peanut spread, which he marketed as ‘peanut butter’. Ever sinc...

With Europeans’ penchant for coffee, you may wonder why coffee wasn’t grown locally. It turns out that coffee plants are quite fussy about where they grow, requiring quite warm temperatures (between about 15 – 29°C) and altitudes above 600 metres. They also prefer rich volcanic soil and distinct wet and dry seasons — but also steady rainfall during the wet season! This phenomenon is so strong that virtually all the coffee in the world is grown in the “Coffee Belt”: the band between the Tropic of Cancer (25°N) and the Tropic of Capricorn (30°S). In addition to providing optimum growing conditions, these environments are conducive to slow ripening of the coffee cherries (beans), allowing them to develop a richer flavour. 

Does anyone else think that we pay excessive prices for our toll roads? Within the last few months, I have had to renew both my driver’s licence and car registration, which comes to well over a grand combined. I’m sure many of you are in a similar situation, so you can probably understand my feeling that it’s a little excessive having to pay an extra fee to drive on certain roads. Of course, I am talking about the dreaded toll roads.  Here in Logan, we have the Logan motorway, which costs up to $3.76 if you wish to grace its tarmac with your vehicle’s presence. All in all, that doesn’t sound too bad, unless you are using it to commute to work every day. If that is the case, you would be paying $1,880 in tolls every year — enough to buy quite a few tanks of fuel, even in this economy! And God forbid that you should dare to take the toll route without having a Linkt tag in your car! This happened to me earlier this year in a second-hand car I had purchased, and I received quite an un...

How has the cost of coffee changed throughout history? Unfortunately, there are no surviving records which tell us how much coffee was sold for in ancient Yemen, which leaves us to speculate. In the “Penny Universities” of 17th century London, a cup of coffee cost a mere penny (worth AU $0.84 today). That doesn’t sound bad at all!  By 1900, coffee was still not a popular beverage in Australia: it was far outweighed by tea. However, the Americans had developed a large cafe culture and commonly sold a cup of coffee for a nickel (5 c, which equates to AU $2.85 today).  Moving forward in history, one Australian newspaper from 1954 reported that a cup of coffee cost 1 shilling ($2.21 today). Prices rose rapidly following a devastating frost in Brazil in 1975, which wiped out much of the crop from that country — which is a large player in the international coffee market. Today in Australia, we pay an average of $6 for a latte. But even that pales in comparison to the most expensive ...

  Are you struggling with the cost of living crunch? With increased inflation of grocery prices, some weeks it can be hard to get by. However, there are actually a lot of generous organisations within Logan City who are keen to help you out.  Check out the following stores and organisations which provide free or heavily discounted groceries!  Authentic Food Outlet : Free and low groceries — 350 Loganlea Rd, Meadowbrook 4131 Tribe of Judah Care Services : Discount groceries — 101 Park Rd, Slacks Creek 4127 Lighthouse Care : Discount groceries — 17 Monte Khoury Dr, Loganholme 4129 Loaves & Fishes : Discount groceries — Unit 1/26 Monte St, Slacks Creek 4127 Do you know any other places where you can get free or discounted groceries in Logan? Let us know at  [email protected]  and we'll add them to the list! 

Do you enjoy reading the newspaper with your coffee? Or maybe you are enjoying The Brewspaper right while you sip at this very moment. We instinctively connect newspapers with coffee and café culture, but this was not always the case. The first coffee house in the world to lay out newspapers for patrons to read was the Kramersche Kaffeehaus in Vienna. It broke from the tradition of the time — where coffee houses tended to be filled with loud debates and discussions — and encouraged a quieter, contemplative atmosphere: hence the newspapers. This style worked out well for the Kramersche Kaffeehaus, which attracted prominent authors and intellectuals from the town and shaped Viennese coffee culture for decades to come. 

Nicolaes Witsen As the fame of coffee grew across Europe, attempts to procure the elusive seeds from Yemen also increased. Around 1693, the mayor of Amsterdam and administrator of the Dutch East India Company — Nicolaes Witsen — used his connections in the Dutch East India Company trading outpost in Yemen to get hold of some fertile coffee beans. He had them sent to the island of Java (Indonesia), where the plants flourished. A single coffee plant was subsequently sent by ship from Java to Amsterdam. It was planted in the Botanical Garden of Amsterdam, where it also produced crops of beans, although the colder European climate did not lend itself to widespread production of coffee. Nevertheless, this gave European botanists a unique opportunity to study live coffee plants. A few decades later, in 1719, the first commercial coffee crop grown in a European colony was harvested in Java. It was the beginning of the end of the Mocha monopoly over this increasingly popular beverage.  Rea...