The small picture on the left depicts a very simple kind of coffee table. You can tell that it's made of some cheap wood and that it's not very decorative at all. Coffee tables come in all shapes and sizes, usually made of some kind of wood, but not so much in recent years.

Wooden Coffee Tables

You'll be extremely lucky if you can find a new coffee table made of solid wood, straight from a tree. Most of what you see nowadays is made of some kind of wood grain laminated covering fiberboard or other kinds of pressed wood scraps.

Let's face it. Real wood furniture is extremely expensive. My bed frame is all solid wood and it cost me a pretty penny, so to speak. It's not even made of expensive wood.

When I was taking wood "shop" in high school, back in 1976, the preferred wood to use for coffee tables was called Koa, more appropriately "Acacia Koa. I was living in Hawaii at the time and they just called it "Koa".

At the time, while other kinds of wood suitable for furniture sold for 20 cents a board foot, Koa sold for 25 cents per board foot. I know it doesn't sound like a lot, but it was back in 1976. Anyway, I doubt they still prefer it because of how expensive it has become due to over logging and blight. That species is endemic to the Hawaiian Islands and although there are Acacia trees where I live in the Philippines, the wood isn't the same as that obtained from the "Koa".

Glass Coffee Tables

The coffee table in my living room is made with aluminum legs supporting a glass tabletop. I'm starting to see these kinds of coffee tables everywhere furniture is sold, along with matching end tables.

Although I'd much prefer having a solid wood coffee table, I just can't afford to buy one. There's nothing wrong with glass tabletops unless you buy cheap coffee tables. The tabletop is usually very thick and isn't easy to break.

When I was growing up, my brothers and other male relatives would put their feet up on the coffee table at my parents' house. My parent always yelled at them that it wasn't a foot stool and to get their feet down.

Well, you can't do that with a glass coffee table unless you want to break it. Sure, you could get away with it for a while, but eventually you'd do something to separate the tabletop from the support beams and that would be the end of that.

The Invention of the Coffee Table

According to sources, the coffee table was invented in Britain during the Victorian Era, between June 1837 and January 1901. Perhaps it was invented specifically as a coffee table at the time, but I think similar tables were invented much earlier in the orient.

The Japanese, for example, have been using low profile tables, some that look like coffee tables, for centuries. They use them for dining and not as coffee tables. Speaking of dining, my wife and I used to dine from our coffee table when we lived in the US, before we owned our own home. We were eating while watching TV and we couldn't see the TV from wherever the kitchen table (if we had one) was.

Now, I'm sure that coffee tables are made of other things besides wood, glass and aluminum, but I can't think of anything right now. As for me, I hope to someday start building one out of empty coffee cans and jars. With as much coffee as I drink, it shouldn't take very long at all.

For years, doctors have been telling people to reduce their consumption of drinks containing high levels of caffeine, picking on coffee as the number one source. While over-indulgence in things that contain caffeine can have adverse effects on your health, how much is too much is open to interpretation.

What is caffeine?

Caffeine is an alkaloid that acts as a stimulant and a mild diuretic. Caffeine is called guaranine when found in guarana, mateine when found in mate, and theine when found in tea; all of these names are synonyms for the same chemical compound.

Caffeine has the effect of temporarily warding off drowsiness and restoring alertness. Humans have been consuming plants containing caffeine since the beginning of time — it occurs naturally in many plants besides coffee and tea, even though coffee and tea get the most publicity for it.

Caffeine is added to soft drinks, especially cola-type soft drinks. I won't go into detail about it since I could spend a day on that topic alone.

Despite the negativity surrounding caffeine, caffeine continues to play a vital role in the health of people all around the world. Again, it's a topic all in itself and I won't go into detail here.

Antioxidants and Flavonoids

Both coffee and tea are high in antioxidants. An antioxidant is a molecule capable of slowing or preventing the oxidation of other molecules. Oxidation is a chemical reaction that transfers electrons from a substance to an oxidizing agent. Oxidation reactions can produce free radicals, which start chain reactions that damage cells.

Flavonoids are known as antioxidants, but they have other significant properties that I can't explain without writing a textbook or plagiarizing someone else. Green tea is higher in flavonoids than other teas, and the amount of flavonoids in coffee is questionable depending on what kind of coffee we're dealing with.

Health Benefits

Antioxidants have been proven to have anti-allergic, anti-inflammatory, anti-microbial and anti-cancer properties. Only a small amount of flavonoids are required, as antioxidants, to show immediate health benefits.

It makes sense to include coffee and tea, if you don't dislike the taste, as part of your diet. It's not known if caffeine-free versions are as effective as those containing caffeine, but it's worth trying if you're on a caffeine-restrictive diet.

Personally, I've been drinking coffee and tea as long as I can remember. I don't have trouble sleeping, a common side-effect of ingesting too much caffeine, and it doesn't cause me to be jittery. Other than old injuries, I have no health concerns. I'll soon be 48-years old and I feel great. You can call me a coffee and tea poster child, if you wish, and it won't offend me at all.

Recommended Reading

• Coffee May Help Prevent Liver Cancer
• Feed Your Face: Green Tea

After watching the employees at one of the Starbucks locations in Phoenix, Arizona, my wife decided to do an experiment to see if she could make coffee that tasted as good as their coffee. More specifically, she wanted to reproduce the taste of their lattes.

Latte is Italian for Milk

Lattes were invented in the US. In Italy, latte means milk. It's probably okay to order a caffè latte in Italy now, after all the publicity of the drink, but years ago it would have fetched you a glass of milk.

In the US, a latte is quite simply a cup of coffee made with milk instead of water.

It Starts With Espresso

Starbucks has machines which produce espresso, a concentrated coffee beverage brewed by forcing very hot water under high pressure through coffee that has been ground to a consistency between extremely fine and powder. Espresso, which was invented in Italy, is used as the base lattes, cappuccinos and mochas.

My wife noticed that two shots of espresso were added to the large drinks at Starbucks, while added only one shot to the smaller drinks.

How to Mimic a Latte

It's easy to do if you have your own personal espresso machine. What if you don't? Here's how my wife did it:

She filled a cup with milk (whole milk, not 2%, 1% or skim milk), heated it in the microwave oven for 2 minutes, added two spoons of coffee power and stirred. I'm talking about the spoons you eat with, not teaspoons for measuring.

What you end up is a strong cup of coffee, a simple latte. If you want to turn it into a cappuccino, add whip cream to the top. If you want to turn it into a mocha, add a spoonful of sweetened, powdered chocolate.

Why Starbucks instead of at home?

If it's so easy to make coffee that tastes like Starbucks at home, then why don't people do that instead of spending much more money at coffee shops like that?

People are always "on the go" and don't take the time at home to enjoy the simple pleasures. They stop by coffee shops on the way to work or on the way home. It's the fast-paced societies that keep companies like Starbucks in business.

I always knew that tea was a healthy drink, but I didn't know it had healthy external uses as well. One of the external uses is in the treatment of sweaty feet, which causes foot odor.

Stinky Feet

Over-the-counter treatments sold by most pharmacies are either expensive or don't work or both. Using foot powders can help to draw the sweat away from the feet, but the kind that are supposed to get rid of the odor usually have a scent that's just as bad.

Charcoal sole inserts help to reduce the odor, but that's all they do. They don't help to cure the cause of the odor. Most of the other foot treatments don't get rid of the cause either.

Stinky feet start out as sweaty feet. You can have sweaty feet without ever wearing shoes that cover the feet. People who wear sandals all the time can have feet as stinky as anyone else. Odor causing bacteria thrive in the sweat. The optimum solution would be to wash the sweat from the feet frequently, but who has that kind of time luxury?

Natural Cures

In the Philippines, where I live, people have been using a form of alum called tawas as a deodorant and it works as well as anything sold commercially for much more. The problem is that it also whitens the skin by removing the top layer. It's used as a skin whitener as often as a deodorant.

Tea contains a natural tannic acid that will kill the bacteria that lives in the sweat of the feet, as the article on "How to Treat Sweaty Feet With Tea" explains. The tannic acid will also help to prevent blisters.

I've used tawas in the past, but I've never used tea. I used to have feet so stinky, I was afraid to take my shoes off in public places. The tawas worked, but all the tanned skin from my feet came off along with the odors. Tea can stain the feet, but the article I mentioned tells you how to remove the stains. My feet are starting to give off odors again and it's time to give tea a try.

It may not be the best automatic drip coffee maker available, but the Mr. Coffee coffee maker was the first brand to hit the market in 1972. In business, you either have to be the first or the best if you want to have guaranteed success. Okay, so you can get away with being second best and still succeed, but it's not guaranteed.

Mr. Coffee and Joe DiMaggio

When the commercials started appearing on television in 1972, Joe DiMaggio was the celebrity spokesman pitching it for the company. Joe DiMaggio was a famous baseball player who played exclusively for the New York Yankees from 1936 to 1951. He died in 1999 at the age of 84, the age my own father is right now.

I don't know if it was the product or Joe that convinced my mother to buy a Mr. Coffee, but she bought one nevertheless. I don't remember exactly when she bought it; I know she bought before we moved to Hawaii in 1974.

Automatic Drip Coffee Makers versus Coffee Percolators

When the automatic drip coffee makers first came out, the coffee didn't taste as good after brewing as it did with percolators. The trouble was that the grind available in most stores was still designed for percolators. After the grind specifically made for automatic drip coffee hit the market, I couldn't tell the difference anymore.

There are some that lament to obsolescence of the percolators, saying they were more "green" that the automatic drip coffee makers are. They cite the paper being used for the filters and water evaporation as being "non-green".

They obviously haven't heard that certain fast-growing trees are being used solely for the paper and yet it's still recyclable. The new trees reach maturity before they're even needed. I don't buy the water evaporation part. Percolators put out as much steam as automatic drip coffee makers. I only had to put my hand above a spout one time to find that out.

Popular Culture

Unlike other brands, the Mr. Coffee has become a cultural icon. It was parodied as "Mr. Fusion" in the Back to the Future movie trilogy and as "Mr. Radar" and "Mr. Rental" in the Spaceballs movie. The actual coffee maker made cameo appearances in TV shows and other movies, playing itself and has been included in the lyrics to songs and gets referenced in short stories.

I don't know what the Mr. Coffee automatic drip coffee maker did to be such a popular cultural icon. Oh yeah, it was first.

There are so many ways to make iced tea, it's probably impossible to write about all of them. I'm going to try to cover the ways that I've done it, my mother and siblings have done it and the way I've seen other people do it. I'll start with the picture you see on the left.

The Hamilton Beach Iced Tea Maker

I always thought that making iced tea was incredibly simple and couldn't be made any easier. Actually, the simplest way is to use instant iced tea. In my opinion, however, instant iced tea tastes like utter garbage compared to iced tea being made from freshly-brewed tea using tea bags.

The Hamilton Beach Iced Tea Maker is one of several kitchen gadgets that makes brewing a half-gallon (two quarts) of tea extremely easy. All you have to do is to fill the reservoir with water, put the tea bags into the chamber at the top of the serving pitcher, and turn it on. In 10 minutes, you have freshly-brewed tea. I wouldn't recommend putting ice in the pitcher, as displayed, before brewing or you're just going to end up with more water.

The instructions won't tell you how much tea to put in the chamber. Based on experience, I would use one or two of the large tea bags or three or four of the small tea bags. To be honest, I've had one of these sitting on my kitchen counter for almost two months and I've yet to use it. I still have a jar of instant iced tea in an upper cupboard and it's still only half empty. I drink a lot more coffee than I do tea.

Old-Fashioned Tea Brewing

The way my mother and siblings brewed tea was to put tea bags in a sauce pan and let it boil for 10 or 15 minutes. After the tea cooled a little, the tea bags would be thrown away and the tea would be transferred to a gallon pitcher. Water would then be added to the pitcher to make the full gallon.

The tea bags wouldn't be thrown away immediately. They usually poured the brewed tea into the pitcher, poured more water into the pan and then poured that water into the pitcher before adding more plain water. This was how they extracted the last remaining amount of tea still in the tea bags.

Sun Tea

In places where the sun shines most of the year, people make sun tea. There have even been entrepreneuring companies making specialty glass containers for sun tea.

The way we always made sun tea was by filling an old pickle jar (which held a gallon) with water, put five of the small tea bags or three of the large tea bags in, and put the lid back on. We would leave it out in the sun for about an hour because we liked it strong.

Iced Tea - The Final Ingredients

Some people add nothing to the tea except ice cubes. Other people add sugar. I've see creamer added to hot tea, but never to iced tea.

A lot of people, mostly US southerners, like sweet iced tea. One of the chicken places I went to when I lived in that area provided sweet iced tea with almost every order of chicken. It was so sweet; it was almost too sweet to drink.

I prefer my iced tea to be slightly sweetened. No more than two spoonfuls of sugar with 8-12 ounces of tea is enough.

I shouldn't really say "old-fashioned", but I couldn't think of another way to describe coffee makers that most people don't use anymore. The Pyrex coffee percolator pictured is the exact style of coffee pot that my mother and older sisters used when I was growing up in the 60s and 70s.

Pyrex

"Pyrex" is a word that was made up by Corning Incorporated in 1915. Although they sold the consumer products division in 1998, "Corning Incorporated" still appears at the Pyrex web portal. They no longer sell any kind of coffee pots, from what I can see.

Pyrex is a brand name that was synonymous with glass. It didn't matter what type of glass they used although they originally used borosilicate glass. I believe they now use soda lime glass. I also believe their glassware is tempered and heat resistant. I'm relying on memory, but I never saw any glass coffee percolators crack.

Operation

The glass coffee percolators that I've seen operate in the same ways. I understand there is another kind that operates a little differently, but I've never seen one in person.

Coffee grounds are placed in a basket at the top of long cylindrical tube which almost reaches the sides of the basket. I've never seen any baskets made from anything besides aluminum. The tube for a glass coffee percolator is also made of glass and the pedestal at the bottom, which rests against the bottom of the pot, is made of glass as well. In fact, the only other metal part of this particular coffee maker is the band that goes around it. I don't remember if the band served to secure the handle or not.

After the coffee is brewed to the point of completion, usually when the coffee is dark brown, the heat is lowered enough just to keep the coffee pot warm. I can remember many times when the coffee sat long enough to be considered burnt. It tasted nasty at that point. I used to watch the liquid percolate; I could see it hitting the inside knob of the lid. I think the lid was designed the way it was for exactly that reason.

During times of little money, my mother and siblings used to re-use the coffee grounds. It took longer for the coffee to brew the second time and it usually never got as dark as the first time. A third time was out of the question. I think modern automatic-drip coffee grounds can't be used in the same way, but I've never tested any to find out.

Metal Coffee Percolators

A cursory search using Google Image Search will reveal coffee percolators of all kinds still in existence, though none quite like the image I found that matched what my mother used. There were others that I remember, like the metal coffee pots that were used during camping trips. They operated in the same way, but brewing time had to be estimated because the liquid couldn't be seen.

Some of the images I found on Google were misleading. Some younger people might be fooled when they see an image of a coffee decanter versus a coffee percolator. The decanters are only used to keep coffee hot for serving. They can't be used as coffee makers in any way, shape or form. Some of them appear to be metal and aren't — they're made of plastic that looks like metal.

Image Source

I spent hours going from website to website looking for the particular model to use as a thumbnail for this article. Trust me when I say that I only found one site that had it displayed and it was with a message that said "out of stock". It was a Japanese website, but for the life of me, I can't find it again. I'll be happy to credit the image to the appropriate source if someone can point it out to me. Because I believe in "fair use", I did not provide the larger, original image and the image used is at a much lower resolution.

Unlike coffee, the many kinds of tea are not produced from multiple species. The different varieties of tea come from one plant, the camellia sinensis. I'm not talking about teas (like herbal tea) which do not come from the tea plant; I'm specifically talking about the varieties made from the tea plant.

Tea is Classified by the Producing Technique

The traditional tea consumed by most Americans is black tea. It's the same plant used for green tea, so green tea isn't any healthier for you than black tea. Here are the classifications:

• White tea: Un-Wilted and unoxidized
• Yellow tea: Un-wilted and unoxidized but allowed to yellow
• Green tea: Wilted and unoxidized
• Oolong: Wilted, bruised, and partially oxidized
• Black tea: Wilted, crushed, and fully oxidized
• Post-fermented tea: Green Tea that has been allowed to ferment/compost

What about Red Tea?

When my family moved to Hawaii in the 70s, and I was a teenager, my parents planted a unique hedgerow. It was a repeating row in an order than included Tea, Red Tea and Bird of Paradise. The tea plant was the tea plant I'm talking about. The red tea plant is something else. Although it looks like the regular tea plant, it's not red version of it. Frankly, I don't know what it was.

How Tea is Consumed

I've always known about tea being consumed either cold (iced) or hot. The British like it hot, while most Americans like it iced. Unlike coffee, again, tea isn't used in candies and cakes and the leaves aren't eaten with chocolate.

Local Tea Varieties

I'm unaware of any tea that's grown locally. If I look at some of the packaging, I'd probably find out that some of what I think is imported is actually made in the Philippines.

I usually buy the instant NESTEA, without sugar or lemon flavoring added. I like to taste the tea, not the additives. Yes, I add sugar, but how much I add depends on how strong I make it. I like it iced and lightly sweetened, not heavily sweetened like the US southerners.

Unfortunately for me, most Filipinos like the added lemon, so the plain NESTEA is always hard to find.

Until very recently, I didn't know about the many kinds of coffee. I knew about the two species commonly used, but I just found out there are many more. How did I find out? I was cruising around Wikipedia and found their article on coffee, that's how. Of course, reading any Wikipedia article has a tendency to make the brain go numb due to all the references, citations, and technical details you have to wade through.

The Two Main Species of Coffee

While I say they're the two main species, that's not really correct. They're just the main species most widely used and thus, more widely distributed.

The most popular of all is the coffea arabica, of which many varieties exist. It originated in Ethiopia many centuries ago and derives its name from Arabia.

The other popular species is coffea robusta. It supposedly has more flavor and is more expensive.

How Coffee is Consumed

When I was young and living in the US, no one ever mentioned anything other than hot, brewed coffee. That's the way it was served in restaurants, fast-food joints, and at home. The reality is that it's only one of many ways coffee is consumed.

Here's a partial list of ways I've seen coffee consumed, or consumed by me:

• Brewed and served hot - traditional American coffee
• Brewed and served cold - iced coffee
• As Espresso
• Chocolate-covered coffee beans
• Coffee Cake
• As a candy ingredient

It's a short list and if I sat here long enough, I'm sure I could think up a few more.

Local Coffee Varieties

While I primarily drink coffee made by NESCAFÉ, there are some other varieties grown where I live, in the Philippines. The coffee used for the NESCAFÉ brand is grown locally and I believe it's an Arabica.

I do not know which local brands are made from the coffea liberica species, but it would be an interesting experience to sample them. Anyway, the plants are grown in the Batangas and Cavite provinces and I hope to someday get a chance to check out the farms.

This blog is all about coffee, tea and anything (and I do mean anything) related to either one.

I have been drinking coffee and tea all my life (which started in 1960) and I prefer them over any other drinks, even plain water. You can ask me if I'm a coffee lover and a tea lover, a coffee addict and a tea addict, or a coffee fanatic and a tea fanatic and I'll reply with something like "all of the above".

I drank coffee and tea before I joined the military in 1978, while in the military, and I continue to drink them in my retirement years.