Merlins Magical Mix of Dessert Coffees and More!

Merlins Coffee is Magic With plenty of offstreet parking, Merlin's is your first stop in Historic Downtown Hanover. Grab some coffee, tea or hot chocolate and enjoy your first-rate beverage with a sweet treat to set your day off right. And we're green, too. There's a special discount if you bring your go-cup.

Really - We've got the Beans

There's a whole lot of difference between coffees. Beans are graded like fine wines, and we get some of the best beans imported into the country. The beans are roasted fresh and ground not long before you drink the coffee.

The Beans are the Seeds

The brewed beverage we call coffee, is made from the roasted seed of the coffee plant. In the 800s, Ethiopians started to drink it for the stimulant effect. Legend has it that shepherds watched their goats dance after consuming wild coffee berries. In fact, the word coffee comes from the Arabic words meaning "wine of the bean". It spread all over the Arabian world and inched its way into Italy by the time of the Renaissance.

Leonhard Rauwolf, a German physician spent ten years in the Middle East. In 1583, Doctor Rauwolf wrote a description of coffee:

"A beverage as black as ink, useful against numerous illnesses, particularly those of the stomach. Its consumers take it in the morning in a porcelain cup that is passed around and from which, each one drinks a cupful. It is composed of water and the fruit from a bush called bunnu."

A Rebellious Tradition

American tradition holds that coffee increased in popularity after the hated Stamp Act imposed a tax on tea. Bostonians upset with this tax decided to dump a bunch of tea into the harbor in what became known as the Boston Tea Party. Patriots boycotted the tea and turned to coffee, instead.

During the American Civil War, residents of New Orleans turned to brewing chickory root as a substitute for the coffee that was in short supply due to the Federal blockade of the Port of New Orleans. Coffee with chickory is still the preferred coffee in New Orleans. The Port of New Orleans is also the number one point of entry for imported coffee in these United states.

So, there is an historical rebelliousness associated with coffee and it is one of the most valuable legally traded commodities (after oil).