Cuban Coffee Maker: "Colador de Tela"

This colador de tela, Spanish for cloth filter, system is used to make cafe carretero. The Cubans call their coffee "cortadito"

Two main species of coffee trees are cultivated today: Coffea arabica, accounting for 75-80 percent of the world's production, and Coffea canephora. Three to four years after the coffee is planted,flowers grow in clusters in the axils of the coffee leaves. Fruit is produced only in the new tissue. The coffee cherry will change color from green to red about thirty to thirty-five weeks after flowering and be ready to harvest. For the greatest success in production, coffee trees need a favourable climate: areas between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, with frequent rains and temperatures varying from 15 to 25 Degrees C. The trees thrive in deep, hard, permeable, well-irrigated, with well-drained subsoil. The best lands are the hilly ones, those cut into a mountainside, of volcanic nature with disintegrating rocks or from just-tilled woods.

There are several legendary accounts of the origin of the coffee drink. The most popular involves a goat-herd, Kaldi, who, noticing the energizing effects when his flock nibbled on the bright red berries of a certain bush, chewed on the fruit himself. His exhilaration prompted him to bring the berries to a Muslim holy man in a nearby monastery. But the holy man disapproved of their use and threw them into the fire, from which an enticing aroma billowed. The roasted beans were quickly raked from the embers, ground up, and dissolved in hot water, yielding the world's first cup of coffee. The Ethiopian ancestors of today's Oromo tribe, were the first to have recognized the energizing effect of the native coffee plant.
The earliest credible evidence of either coffee drinking or knowledge of the coffee tree appears in the middle of the fifteenth century, in the Sufi monasteries of the Yemen in southern Arabia. Coffee beans were first exported from Ethiopia to Yemen. Yemeni traders brought coffee back to their homeland and began to cultivate the bean. It was in Yemen that coffee beans were first roasted and brewed as they are today. Coffee then spread to Egypt and North Africa, and by the 16th century, it had reached the rest of the Middle East, Persia and Turkey. From the Muslim world, coffee drinking spread to Italy, then to the rest of Europe, and coffee plants were transported by the Dutch to the East Indies and to the Americas.
Source:
www.cubanfoodmarket.com