A Little history of the coffee bean Being an in the coffee roasting business, I frequently get asked, “How did we begin roasting and drinking coffee?” Wanting to share the information I’ve learned from the industry, I’ve put together this essay about “the bean.” Coffee and the Past Legend has it that the stimulant properties of coffee were discovered sometime before the ninth century by an Abyssinian goat herd named Kaldi. Bored and mischievous, the young man’s goats began snacking on coffee cherries while he napped nearby. Waking to find his herd pirouetting off rocks and the surrounding canyon walls, Kaldi collected a handful of the bright red fruit and hastened home to his village imam. As an experiment, the religious leader boiled the cherries in water and then drank the concoction himself. He became alert and lively, so much so that maintaining wakefulness during evening prayers was uncharacteristically effortless. These stimulating properties made coffee an instant hit among the ranks of the faithful, and its use rapidly became routine. As coffee gained in popularity, the sixteenth-century Muhammadans found reason to complain. Ironically, they considered coffee to be a threat to religious sobriety, especially upon witnessing that followers were more likely to frequent street-side cafes than they were to visit the mosques. Consumption was discouraged, and rumors linking the beverage with impotence, among other “ills,” spread wildly. Still, there was no scarcity of coffee drinkers. In fact the Arabians guarded their beans with extreme jealousy. All coffee beans designated for export were boiled, destroying their ability to germinate and be domesticated outside the region. Although there is an unofficial record that one religious pilgrim smuggled a seedling back to India in the early 1600s and planted it behind his hut in the Mysore area (where a great deal of good coffee has grown since), the commercial production of coffee remained under Arab control through the latter part of the century. Not long after Venetian traders first presented coffee to Europe in 1615, Pope Clement VIII was warned it might prove threatening to the holy aims of the Church. A legislature of priests accused the beverage of being a tool for the devil, designed to lure good worshipers into losing their souls. Curious, the pope requested that his attendants bring a cup of the stuff to him. He found its aroma pleasing and, upon tasting it, became so enamored with the brew that he decided to get the better of the devil by baptizing it, thereby making coffee a “truly Christian beverage.” The Dutch orchestrated the first successful planting outside Arabia on the island of Java in 1699. An initial trial shipment was sent back to Amsterdam in 1706 and included one seedling, which was planted in the botanical gardens. This tiny plant later played the role of a parent seedling to the majority of the coffee grown in the western world. When coffee gained so in popularity in Germany that it replaced other breakfast beverages, the eighteenth-century ruler Frederick the Great issued a desperate manifesto. “It is disgusting to notice the increase in quality of coffee used by my subjects,” he declared, complaining with particular bitterness that the revenues for coffee went to foreign hands while profit from beer came to the crown. “My people,” he protested, “must drink beer.” Johann Sebastian Bach’s famous one-act operetta, the Coffee Cantata, was a thinly veiled operatic criticism of the extraordinary lengths the royalty and upper classes took to keep common folk from enjoying the beverage. The fashionable populations of Vienna and London willingly blessed the beverage as well, although it was a Turkish ambassador’s introduction of coffee to Paris that sparked a veritable explosion of coffee culture. It was rumored that Louis XV spent $15,000 per year on coffee for his daughters. Even the most avid coffee drinkers are astonished to hear that Voltaire supposedly consumed 50 cups a day. Balzac, another devotee among the French literati, applied its exciting properties like this: He went to bed at six in the evening, slept until midnight, then rose for 12 solid hours of writing, during which time his sole sustenance was coffee. After many disappointing attempts, a coffee seedling measuring about five feet tall was successfully transplanted from the botanical gardens in Amsterdam to the gardens in Paris. Soon after, a young naval officer, Gabrial Mathieu de Clieu, triumphed as a coffee pioneer by bringing one of the plant’s offspring to the Americas. According to his own account, De Clieu shared his shipboard water ration with the plant, fended off jealous shipmates, and survived both storm and calm to finally triumph in planting the little tree when he docked at Martinique. Within 50 years, there were more than 18 million coffee shrubs growing on the island; these were the progenitors of most of the coffee plants growing in Central and South America today. Consumption of coffee in the United States began as early as 1668. The first documented license to sell coffee was obtained by Dorothy Jones of the Massachusetts Colony in 1670. It was the famous British tax on tea, however, that elevated the role of coffee forever. The British East India Tea Company harbored plans to develop a profitable market in the colonies. But the Boston Tea Party, plotted by revolutionaries in Boston’s lively Green Dragon coffee house, made drinking coffee a popular form of protest against the iron fist on the monarchy. From that point forward, the more refined beverage of the British crown never regained a substantial foothold. Today, the United States consumes more coffee than any other nation in the world. Although the per-capita intake peaked in the 1960s, our national average is again on the rise. Numbers indicate that the fuel behind this, and a parallel increase in Canada, is the emerging specialty coffee segment of the market. Clearly, an emphasis on better coffee is again attracting consumers. What is Coffee? To develop a knowledgeable relationship with coffee you must first understand what coffee is. The coffee bean is actually a seed, or pit of the round, red “cherry” fruit of a tropical evergreen shrub. The coffee shrub can grow to 15 feet in height with thick branches and broad, waxy green leaves. In addition to the red berry clusters of coffee cherries, each coffee shrub has loads of jasmine scented flowers. A normal cherry contains two beans that grow nestled against each other. When one of these beans doesn’t develop properly, the remaining bean takes over the extra space at the heart of the cherry and becomes unusually rounded. These anomalies are known as “peaberries.” Because of their unique appearance, they are occasionally sorted out from the other beans and sold separately. Today, most of us consume our coffee by the cup which requires processing to free the beans from the cherry, roasting, grinding, and then brewing with filtered hot water. Earlier coffee consumers fermented the tangy coffee fruit for liquor; evidence shows others boiled the leaves for tea. Ethiopian nomads even rolled beans with animal fat to fashion a sort of traveler’s quick-energy bar. Since its discovery in Arabia around the ninth century, coffee has become one of the world’s most popular agricultural products. In terms of trade volume, coffee is second only to oil in worldwide trade. It is one of the most labor-intensive food products, undergoing more than 15 processing steps from the cherry to your coffee cup. The annual yield of a coffee shrub is approximately one pound of roasted coffee and on the average it takes five years before a young shrub bears a full harvest. Robusto or Arabica There are two major species of coffee grown for commercial use, “robusto” and “arabica” beans. The Robusto bean grows at lower elevations, has a higher yield per plant, and is more disease resistant than is its arabica relative. Robusto beans are noteworthy for their harsh, dirty flavor and contain twice as much caffeine as what’s found in the arabica bean. A relatively low cost of production makes robusto beans a favorite with North American canned coffees. The arabica bean, which grows best at higher elevations, is the source of the world’s great coffees. About 75 percent of the world’s total coffee production is arabica. At most 10 percent of that is of “specialty” quality. Growing The coffee shrub requires a frost-free climate, moderate rainfall, and plenty of sunshine. The regions where coffee grows, known as “origin regions” are grouped loosely in three geographical nameplates: the Americas, Africa and Arabia, and Indonesia. Within these regions, coffee grows in almost 80 different countries. It grows at altitudes ranging from sea level to 6000 feet, in all sorts of different soils and microclimates. The environment required for growing the best “specialty” coffee is found only in select mountainous regions in the tropics, between the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer. These coffee bean shrubs demand high altitudes, usually between 4000 - 6000 feet, to produce their wonderful flavors. They need an annual rainfall of about 80 inches, with distinctly rainy and dry seasons. The soil in which fine coffees grow must be extremely fertile, and is often volcanic. Regular mist and cloud cover are also necessary to protect the shrubs and their valuable cherries from overexposure to sunlight. For such high quality coffee to thrive, year round daytime temperatures must average 60-70 degrees, which by tropical standards is quite cool. The result is a longer, slower growth cycle, yielding beans that are denser and far more intense in flavor than their lower-grown neighbors. In some growing regions, most notably Guatemala and Costa Rica, beans are graded by elevation. Processing After the ripe cherries are picked, the beans must be extracted from within the cherry. There are four layers which separate the bean, from the outer cherry: A tough shiny outer skin, a sticky mucilaginous pulp of the fruit, a stiff parchment casing and the thin delicate silverskin which cling to the bean. There are two methods used to extract the beans, the washed process and the dry process. The method used depends largely on the availability of fresh water, which is one of the most important determinants of coffee flavor. The washed, or wet, method involves mechanically removing the pulp from the beans. After removing the pulp, top quality wet-processed coffees are transferred to large fermentation tanks. It is in the fermentation tanks the sticky fruit swells and releases from the beans inside. Many first time plantation visitors are surprised to discover that these tanks of coffee smell like new-made wine. Fermentation lasts 12 - 36 hours, depending on atmospheric conditions and the nature of the coffee itself. The path from ripe to rotten is short. If this stage is not stopped at the exact moment fermentation is complete, an entire batch of coffee can be ruined. Once fermentation is complete, the beans are washed free from the loosened fruit. The coffee beans, with the intact parchment layer, are left to dry on large patios. To ensure even drying, the beans must be raked and thereby turned several times every day. Washed coffees are brighter and offer cleaner, more consistent flavors than those processed by the dry method. Not surprisingly, the wet method predominates in Latin America, the very region whose coffees we associate with these characteristics. In more industrialized coffee-growing countries like Costa Rica, traditional wet processing is being replaced with a variation called aqua-pulping. With this method, the coffee is just deplulped, rinsed, and dried. Sadly, such coffee can’t express the high notes and varietal charm characteristic of traditionally washed beans. Dry-processed coffees are generally heavier bodied and more variable in flavor than wet-processed beans. You will find that most Indonesian coffees are dry-processed, as are some of the more traditional coffees of Africa and Arabia. Milling and Sorting After being processed, coffee beans are milled to remove their stiff parchment and light, translucent silverskin. They are then sorted by size and density. At every step of the way, the milling and sorting processes work to bring like beans together, and this is critically important to good roasting. Defects, which may include broken or unripe beans and small stones, twigs, or other foreign material, are also removed during milling and sorting. Separated from defects and shed of their trappings, coffee beans are known to the trade and “green coffee.” In truth, unadulterated “green” beans range in color from opalescent blue to a matte gray-green. Compared to roasted coffee, which has a shelf life that is measured in days, green coffee is fairly stable, with a shelf life of up to one year. Drinking All this takes place before I get my supply of green beans which I then roast fresh daily at Delaware City Coffee Company. With the exception of decaffeinated Espresso beans, I roast everything I sell. We ship coffee all over the United States. All my coffees are available for sale by the pound and if you don’t have a grinder at home, I’m happy to grind for order. | 
