TEA might historically have been the British tipple but over the past couple of decades a thriving coffee culture has frothed up in our towns and cities.

And whereas the main question used to be whether you wanted your coffee black or white, today’s consumer is confounded by the myriad beans and blends on offer.

In a bid to help customers navigate their way through the maze of flat whites, frappucinos and cappuccinos, one high street chain in Hexham has staged its first ‘coffee masterclass’.

Visitors to the special event in Costa’s Fore Street café last week learned all about the history of coffee and its journey from bean to cup and were even invited up to the ‘high altar’ of the gleaming Astoria espresso machine to learn how to be a barista.

Barista maestro, Liam Tweddle, who some readers may recognise as the man behind ‘Tweddle’s Trivia’, the blackboard quiz game he runs in the shop, is an authority on the little brown bean, which, he is quick to explain, is not actually a bean at all.

“Coffee beans aren’t beans, they’re the seeds inside of a cherry on a coffee tree – the pits inside the coffee fruit,” he says. Liam is, as you might expect of the best barista in the North (he won the Costa competition last year), incredibly clued up about coffee.

The drink originated in Ethiopia in the 13th century. “Coffee was first discovered by an Ethiopian goat farmer who noticed when his goats had fruit from the coffee trees, they started to get frisky and dance,” Liam says. “He figured that if we ate the fruit then maybe it would do the same thing for us.” Legend has it that Kaldi, the goatherd, in his caffeine-fuelled enthusiasm, took the fruit to an Islamic monk who disapprovingly tossed them into a fire, which produced a delicious aroma.

The roasted beans were quickly raked from the embers, ground up, and dissolved in hot water, resulting in the world’s first cup of coffee. Whether or not you believe the mythology doesn’t really matter, but it’s true that coffee does hail from the Middle East and that it was first properly cultivated in Yemen.

In fact it was the Yemenis who called it ‘qahwa’, the Arabic name which is the derivation of our words coffee and café. By the 1500s, coffee had spread to Egypt through the Yemeni port of Mocha. The first coffee houses grew up in Cairo in Egypt and in Syria, especially in the once cosmopolitan city of Aleppo, and then in Istanbul, the capital of the vast Ottoman Turkish Empire.

It came to Europe by two routes – from the Ottoman Empire, and by sea from Mocha. As Liam notes: “People think that Mocha means chocolate, but it actually comes from the name of the city, which originally was the biggest port for coffee in the world.”

The Costa brothers, Bruno and Sergio, named their original blend, Mocha Italia, when they began selling to a handful of local caterers back in 1971. And today, it continues to be the chain’s signature ‘secret’ blend – and Liam’s personal favourite. The coffee company, now owned by Whitbread, imports its coffee from producers around the world including Columbia, India, Vietnam and Ethiopia. “There are 84 countries around the world than can grow coffee,” Liam asserts. “They are at 25 degrees North and South of the equator. Any land in that band can grow coffee and it’s called ‘the coffee belt.’”

Beans have their own distinctive taste, depending on where in the world they’re sourced and coffee connoisseurs will tell you the flavours are as diverse as those of wine grapes.

Of the two main coffee trees, arabicas account for about 70 per cent of the harvest whilst the harsher beans of the hardier robusta tree account for about 30 per cent.

In London Costa employs a man called Gennaro Pelliccia as a coffee taster, who had his tongue insured for £10m with Lloyd’s of London in 2009. And to make coffee even more complicated, there are now so many choices about how you’d like it served – Americano, cappuccino, espresso, macchiato, mocha, or latte?

Leanne Dodd, who, was runner-up in our area (North East and the Borders) barista contest this year, says: “There are five extraction methods – espresso, triple shot (three shots of espresso); a ristretto (a shorter, sweeter espresso); a fortissimo shot which is what we use for our flat white and a corto which is a shorter fortissimo shot.”

Any the wiser? Well, it all starts with the espresso, which is basically coffee brewed by forcing hot water under high pressure through finely ground coffee. If you prefer milk with your coffee, then simply, it’s a matter of how ‘textured’ you like it.

A latte is an espresso with steamed milk, generally in a 1:3 to 1:5 ratio of espresso to milk, with a little foam on top; a cappuccino differs from a latte in that it is prepared with much less steamed or textured milk than the latte, with the total of espresso and milk/foam making up between approximately 150 and 180 ml.

And the flat white, which was exported from Australia and New Zealand, is traditionally made with two shots of espresso topped with stretched and textured milk. The milk is prepared by steaming air into the milk and folding the top layer into the lower layers. To achieve the ‘flat’, non-frothy texture the steamed milk is poured from the bottom of the jug, holding back the lighter froth on the top in order to access milk with smaller bubbles, making the drink smooth and velvety in texture.

So there we have it, a bite sized guide to coffee culture – now, are you sure you’re ordering the right coffee? If not, Liam and Leanne would be happy to help.