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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