Coffee.
If your morning routine includes a cup or two of coffee, you may know a few things about it. It’s a stimulant drink, it comes from beans that are roasted and ground and, for many of us, it’s a staple of life. But do you know where coffee grows and how it gets to America? How a French roast differs from an Italian roast? What a coffee cherry is? Or how decaffeinated coffee is made?
 Photo courtesy CoffeeResearch.org Your morning cup of Joe begins its life on a coffee plantation. |
There’s much more to that morning cup o’ Joe than you may realize! In this article, we’ll look at coffee’s origins and how it spread, where it’s grown, how it’s harvested and processed and what roasting is all about. We’ll finish by learning how to make a really great cup of coffee.
Catching the Buzz
Coffee’s story begins with a goat, at least in legends. It’s said that Kaldi, an Ethiopian goatherd, noticed his goats acting very frisky after eating a certain shrub. He took some of the shrub’s berries for himself, caught the buzz and coffee’s future was secured.
Originally, coffee was a food, not a drink. Early East African tribes mixed the coffee berries (the unhulled bean, also called a coffee cherry) with animal fat, forming energy balls — something like primitive Power Bars. Coffee also grew on the Arabian Peninsula, and it was there that it was first developed into a hot drink, sometime around A.D. 1000. By the 13th century, Muslims were drinking coffee fervently. The “whirling dervishes” of early Islam may have been fueled by coffee.
As Islam spread, so did coffee. But the Arabs closely guarded the coffee plants, and no fertile seeds were found outside Arabia (with the exception of the other place where coffee grew naturally, Africa) until the 1600s. Another coffee legend states that an Indian smuggler named Baba Budan left Mecca with fertile seeds strapped to his chest. Soon, coffee plants were growing in India.
As European traders returned from exotic locales such as Turkey, they brought news of and a new-found taste for the black beverage. It was the Dutch who founded the first European coffee estate on the island of Java, then a Dutch colony (now part of Indonesia), in 1616.
Coffee crossed the Atlantic around 1727. Yet another coffee legend: Brazil’s emperor asks a spy, Lt. Col. Palheta, to smuggle seeds into the country. Palheta goes to French Guiana, exudes his considerable charm on the governor’s wife and leaves with a farewell bouquet — spiked with coffee seedlings. Brazil is now the world’s top coffee producer.
Coffee is grown in only one U.S. state, Hawaii. Its famed Kona coffee, grown on Hawaii’s volcanic mountains, is highly desired.
 Photo courtesy Kona Coffee/Bay View Farm Coffees Kona coffee beans, drying here in Hawaii, are highly desirable by coffee connoisseurs. |
What gives coffee its kick?
Caffeine, of course. Caffeine is trimethylxanthine (C8H10N4O2). It’s an addictive stimulant drug that operates in the brain the same way amphetamines, cocaine and heroin do (although caffeine is much milder than those drugs). Caffeine occurs naturally in a number of plants, including coffee beans. Your average 6-ounce cup of drip-brewed coffee contains 100 mg of caffeine. A 12-ounce cola soft drink contains about 50 mg of caffeine.
The Bean Belt
While you may drink coffee every day, unless you’ve lived in a coffee-producing country you may have no idea what a coffee tree looks like. A coffee tree is a woody perennial evergreen, covered with dark-green, waxy leaves growing opposite each other in pairs. They can grow 30 feet (9 m) high, but in cultivation, coffee trees are kept short for easier harvesting. It takes three or four years after planting for the tree to become productive. The tree produces fragrant white blossoms (some say the blossoms smell like jasmine), and then, nearly a year later, the coffee cherries mature. A coffee tree produces continuously: One plant can be flowering, have immature beans and mature cherries all at the same time. Each tree can produce beans that make between 1 and 1.5 pounds (0.45 and 0.68 kg) of roasted coffee every season.
 Source: National Geographic Coffee grows best in an area known as the Bean Belt — the band around the Earth in between the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer. |
A coffee plant prefers rich soil and mild temperatures, with lots of rain and shaded sun. It grows best in a band around the middle of the world, bounded by the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer, known as the Bean Belt. Soil, climate and altitude affect the flavor of the beans.
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