Coffee – From the Tree to Your Cup
The harvesting of coffee beans is a huge industry. Coffee is second only to oil as a worldwide commodity.
Though there are dozens of bean varieties, the plants fall into two main classes: the arabica, first cultivated on the Arabian Peninsula, and the robusta which contains about twice the caffeine.
The fruit is not of any interest to coffee growers. It simply serves as a protective home to the valuable seed, or bean, that it holds inside. This beans is the start for the over 400 millions cups of coffee made worldwide on a daily basis.
There are two major classes of beans determined by their appearance red and green. The red beans have less acidity and a shaper aroma. They are used for the specialty coffees. One of the most important steps in producing good coffee is picking the fruit.
Must of the fruit is hand picked. This is a slow process. But it requires skill to be able to correctly distinguish between the beans picked and separate the red from the green.
After the fruit it is soaked and scoured to remove the beans from its center. After being removed the beans are cleaned to remove any excess fruit. The beans are then laid out on the ground to dry in the sun until almost all moisture from the bean is evaporated away.
Once dried the beans are separated. Some of this work is still done by hand, though machines are now more prevalent to do this part of the job. Once sorted, some beans are allowed to age from between 3 to 8 years, to be used later to make special types of coffees. Others are set aside to be roasted within the same year picked.
During the 400-degree Fahrenheit roasting the beans expand to about twice their dry size, crack and change color from green to brown as oil in the interior is released. It’s this oil that gives the different coffees their basic flavor.
Naturally a wide variety of in-house techniques have developed for roasting. Beans from Java and Kenya, for example, are often lightly roasted producing a distinctive flavor. After roasting, the beans produce carbon dioxide for several days so the beans are ‘de-gassed’ either by airing or packaging in semi-permeable shipping bags.