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For many people coffee is just a drink that acts as an alternative to tea or soda pop. For others, coffee is necessary for survival to help them stay awake during long meetings, and for some, coffee is an art that requires much planning and high efforts are made to maintain its best quality. In any case, coffee must travel through a complicated process before it reaches ones cup. Coffee beans come from a tropical evergreen shrub, which grow as high as 100 feet, although it is usually kept much shorter so that it can be maintained.
The leaves look very similar to the leaves of a laurel bush, and the blossoms smell like jasmine. The average tree produces 1 - 1. 5 pounds of roasted coffee per year. Coffee beans are in all actuality a seed that are contained in a bright red plump cherry. The coffee cherry has a thin skin, with a bitter flavor, and the inner portion is similar to a grape in texture and is quite sweet. A parchment, which is a slimy layer of mucilage, protects the bean.
The coffee bean is a bluish color and is coated in a thin layer called a silver skin. It takes around five years for a tree to bear a full crop of coffee cherries and will then continue to produce for 15 years. The three major types of trees are the Robusta, Arabic, and the Liberia. The Rubusta grows in lower elevations, has a harsh flavor, and contains around 2 % caffeine. This is a lower grade of coffee, and is used in instant coffee and commercial coffee. The Arabic coffee flourishes in 3 - 6. 5 thousand feet altitude.
They contain about 1 % caffeine in weight. Because of the slower process is only yields about 1 - 1. 5 pounds of coffee per year, but the quality is much improved. Arabic coffee is 75 % of the coffee in production today. The last tree, Liberia, is a minor crop in Africa that is similar to Rubusta (Clark 1 - 3). Sand is the ideal soil in which coffee should grow.
Coffee shrubs must be kept watered; most of the water supply for the plants comes from irrigated wells. The wells are drilled 250 - 300 meters with a pump that is placed 60 meters into it; rainfall will usually replenish the wells water. The first harvest of the cherries from the tree happens about 18 months after planting. The crops are planted in rows about 1. 8 meters apart from one another, with a distance of. 5 meters between each planting. The seeds are normally planted in February or early March. After planting fertilizers and pesticides must be used to help keep weeds out (Ag Brazil 1 - 2).
In the processing of the coffee bean, there are a few different methods. One method for extracting the bean is the wet method. This method is used when fresh water is readily available. In this process, a machine peels away the outer layers of skin and the fleshy outside. The bean are the soaked for 24 to 72 hours in fermentation tanks.
This loosens the rest of the unneeded parts through a series of enzymatic reactions. Beans processed this way will have higher acidity and cleaner flavors. The dry or natural method is where the cherries are set out to dry in the sun for three to four weeks. When the pulp has dried, a hulling machine pulls the outer skin and the pulp away. This is not a very consistent method. It leaves the coffee reduced in acidity and gives it an earthy flavor.
This method is declining do to having to deal with weather (Clark 7 - 8). One specialty method for growing coffee is Shade-grown coffee, which is produced to protect migratory songbirds that live in central and South America. Another specialty coffee is organic coffee. This type of coffee is focused on avoiding pesticides. A third type of specialty coffee is the fair-trade certified coffee. This type of coffee gives extra money to the farmers growing the coffee helps keep them employed.
Coffee is the most traded good in the world following only oil (McMahon 1 - 3). In creating decaffeinated coffee, there are a few ways to remove the caffeine from the coffee bean. One process is called Ethyl Acetate, or more commonly the natural process. The beans are placed in water, which expands the beans size and helps reduce most of the caffeine.
The water and beans are then placed in a tank and combined with the Ethyl Acetate. Next the Ethyl Acetate is steamed off, leaving both bean and flavor filled water. The two are placed back in the first container so the beans can absorb back the flavor. Another method is using Methylene Chloride. The green beans are steamed for 30 minutes, then they are washed with the Methylene Chloride up to 10 hours this removes most all of the caffeine.
The beans are removed from the Methlyene Chloride, and steamed again for 10 hours, to clean the Methlyene Chloride off. Most specialty coffee consumers believe that this is the best method because the Methlyene Chloride binds to the caffeine to strip it all out, leaving the beans taste relatively untouched. Any remaining Methlyene Chloride is baked off in the roasting process (Foley 95 - 96). To roast a coffee bean, the beans are put onto a rotating drum on the inside of the roaster. Then gas flames heat the roaster to temperatures reaching 400 degrees Fahrenheit. After five to seven minutes, the beans will turn a yellowish color which indicates that the beans have lost a portion of their moisture.
After this point, the beans start to make a crackling noise and they double in size. After approximately 12 to 20 minutes of roasting, the beans begin to hiss and pop again, and the oils start to rise to the surface. Right before the beans are completely done roasting, they are poured onto a cooling tray. Large fans are used to help cool the coffee to room temperature. Commercial coffee makers roast their coffee the shortest to cut costs.
They only roast for about 8 - 9 minutes. The specialty roasters roast up to 10 - 11 minutes. In an Italian or French roast, the beans are roasted the longest, up to 22 minutes. This makes the beans very dark in appearance. They are stored in an airtight container called a one-way-valve, that lets out carbon dioxide, but does not let in oxygen (Clark 8 - 10). One commonly used but inconsistent type of grinder is the rotary blade.
A better grinder is a burr grinder, where two wheels spin around each other crushing the beans to a consistent size. Brewing is the next process the bean will go through, and in this process is where the flavor is pulled from the bean, into the beverage. Brewing on a drip machine should take between four and six minutes. The water should be between 195 to 205 degrees Fahrenheit.
The ratio of coffee to water should be four ounces of coffee to every sixty-four fluid ounces of water. Most home coffee pot machines do not do this correctly or consistently. Another alternative to the drip method is the French Press. This is where the grinds are put into a glass carafe, and the hot water is mixed in and left for 2 - 5 minutes. When the ideal time has been met, a screen wire passes through the water pulling out the grinds, leaving the water filled with taste but grind-free (Castle and Nielson 67 - 77). After the coffee has made it through all of the previous processes, it is ready to combined with milk or water to become the final drink we consume.
Espresso is the concentrated coffee liquid that is made from pushing hot high-pressure water through coffee grinds. In a Cappuccino the espresso is at the bottom of the drink, there is foam that is put on top of that. The foam should have a consistency of being thick, rich, soupy, and have an almost silky texture to it. It shouldnt be dry or overly airy, nor should it have any large bubbles. (Castle and Nielson 67 - 77) The foam should almost have a shiny look to it.
An espresso Macchiato is a shot of espresso, which is marked or stained with frothed milk. A small amount of foam is placed on top of the espresso. The Latte usually consists of a shot of espresso per seven ounces of steamed milk. In an eight to twelve ounce Latte there is only one shot of espresso, and in a twelve to sixteen ounce latte there are two shots of espresso. The Latte is similar to the Cappuccino, except that it has more milk and the foam needs to be more airy and less milk like. It is often that people will add chocolate, nutmeg, or flavored syrups to their drinks.
The Caff Americano is espresso with hot water added to it. In most standards for Americanos, there is seven ounces of hot water to every shot of espresso. This is for people who do not want an extremely powerful espresso shot but still want to enjoy its taste and full body. A final common espresso drink is the Caf au Lait.
The Caf au Lait is half extremely hot milk and half regular drip or brewed coffee. All of the drinks can and will differ a bit from country to country, or even coffee house to coffee house (Castle and Neilson 98 - 105). Drinking coffee can be a complicated task when looking at all the options facing a consumer. The tastes of the regular basic coffee sitting in ones office is usually worlds apart from what can be bought at a decent coffee house. If it is late at night and you need a kick of caffeine, or you want to try something other than a drive through coke at a fast food restaurant, then go and buy a Latte or Cappuccino and experience many peoples hard work on creating a coffee masterpiece. Works Cited Castle, Timothy, and Joan Nielson.
The Great Coffee Book. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1999. McMahon, Patrick. Cause Coffees produce a cup with an agenda. USA Today. July 25, 2001.
Feb. 17, 2002. < web 1 - 6 Clark, Donald. Wired Java Fanatic. World of Coffee. Dec. 12, 2001. Feb. 17, 2002. < web 1 - 11. Brazil Frontier Coffee Farming.
Ag Brazil. 2001. Feb. 17, 2002. < web 1 - 4. Foley, Karen. Deconstrucing Decaf. Coffee Almanac. Vol 10, No 6.
June, 2001. 95 - 97
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