We seldom stop to think about all the processes necessary to ensure that we get to wake up with a delicious and reviving cup of coffee every morning. But it’ s quite a trip.
Community Living / Design and Decor
Bean there( then),
bean here( now) The journey of coffee
We seldom stop to think about all the processes necessary to ensure that we get to wake up with a delicious and reviving cup of coffee every morning. But it’ s quite a trip.
Somewhere in the tropical regions of the world – perhaps, like the ABBA song,‘ high-igh-igh on a mountain in Mexico’ – lives a young coffee farmer. Let’ s call him Angelo. Angelo may be a wealthy landowner with thousands of hectares planted to coffee, but it’ s far more ABBA-ly romantic to think of him as a peasant farmer with about 20 trees.
Growing
Coffee trees grow in a wide belt of tropical and subtropical countries on every continent except Antarctica and Europe. The best coffee is grown in mountainside forests or mixed plantations – taking advantage of the long tropical days, but with the temperature mitigated by the high altitude and dappled shade of natural forest trees or interplanted fruit trees. This produces the best coffee, but not in the most efficient way. For efficiency and profit over quality, Angelo’ s counterparts will clear the forests and plant vast hectares of monoculture coffee. Under these conditions, and at lower altitudes, the fine arabica coffee trees wilt and sicken, but the aptly named robusta trees thrive.
Harvesting
Angelo and other small-scale farmers inspect their few trees every couple of days, and hand-pick only the ripest cherries, carefully leaving the not-so-ripe ones for later. That’ s a romantic notion, and it does happen, but very infrequently. At the other end of the scale, huge coffee estates send in ginormous mechanical harvesters when most of the cherries are ripe, not too many are overripe or downright rotten, and quite a few are still green. And there is a whole spectrum in between in which the coffee is hand-harvested by more or less dedicated or disinterested paid seasonal or permanent workers.
The heart of the matter
In the long, long distant past, the coffee cherry( or berry) was harvested for its flavour and juice, and the seed discarded. But those days are over, and now – as a rule – it’ s the cherry that gets discarded. There are various methods of separating the seed and the fruit, with each method producing a different flavour profile.
Coffea is a very unusual fruit. Whereas most fruits have a skin, pulp and a seed, coffee has five layers: the outer skin, the pulp, the mucilage, the parchment and – the treasure at the heart – the seed, which we call a bean. There are three stages in getting to this flavourful heart – processing, drying and milling – and each stage can be carried out in a number of ways. In some countries, the initial quality assessment will happen during processing.
Processing
The first step is breaking down the pulp so that it can easily be removed from the pip. There are basically four methods.
• The original method was the dry process, which is basically spreading the cherries out in the sun until they shrivel up.
• The wet process, which is also called fully washed, involves removing the pulp first, then full immersion and soaking of the remaining mucilage, letting it ferment and separate from the last two inner layers. The wet process results in a cleanertasting coffee, but it requires a lot of water.
• The pulp-natural or honey process has become more popular recently. Even though it has nothing to do with honey, it produces sweeter coffee. In this process, the skin of the cherry is removed, and the pulp then dried in the sun allowing it to get sticky – like honey.
• You can also break down the pulp by fermentation, which can be initiated by either adding a substance such yeast or
,
CO 2 as in winemaking, or by the application of a combination of heat, moisture and pressure.
• Less common methods include monsoon processing and
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