Coffee beans and their way into you breakfast cup

From the origins of coffee beans over two thousand years ago, processing has grown to a worldwide market whose output as a commodity has a dollar value second only to petroleum.

Coffee Bean Varieties

Though there are dozens of varieties, the plants fall into two main classes: the Arabica Coffee Bean , first cultivated on the Arabian Peninsula, and the Robusta Coffee Bean which contains about twice the caffeine.

By contrast to wine, the coffee berry (called cherry) is not valued for its fruit, but only for the bean inside. It's that bean that is aged, roasted, ground and brewed to make the 400 million cups of coffee per day consumed around the world.

They come in two main varieties, green beans and red ones. Red beans have a higher amount of aromatic oil and lower acid content, and are therefore used to produce the finer coffees.

Coffee Picking

Hence one of the most important stages in the life cycle of coffee beans is the picking.

Since most beans are hand picked by laborers, at the rate of a few baskets per day, separating the red and green beans is a valued skill and has a large effect on the final product.

After picking, the fruit is removed by soaking, scouring and mechanical rubbing. Then they are washed to remove any remaining flesh. This fermentation stage produces beans which are dried in the sun over large concrete or rock slabs, until they have about 12% water content.

From there the beans are sorted by color and size, sometimes by hand increasingly often by machine. Some of the beans are discarded, others polished to remove the skin. For select types, the beans are then aged anywhere from three to eight years, while others go to be roasted within a year.

Coffee Roasting

During the 400°F 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, they produce carbon dioxide for several days so the beans are 'de-gassed' either by airing or packaging in semi-permeable shipping bags.

Coffee Grounding

The resulting coffee beans, up to a few weeks later, are then ground where again there are variations in styles and results.

In some cases, burr grinders are used to crush the beans to a consistent-sized granule. In others, choppers are used to chop the beans into small pieces with a less homogeneous-sized result.

Turkish coffee is made by pounding the beans to a powdery consistency, using mortar and pestle.

Coffee Brewing

The final result is then brewed, where the variety of styles and techniques is almost as great as the number of brewers. All these fine differences fall into one of four categories, however: boiling, pressure, gravity and steeping.

In boiling, hot water is run through the grounds then filtered or settled. In pressure methods, such as espresso, the slightly-less-than-boiling-hot water is forced through the grounds at high pressure.

Gravity or drip brew drips hot water onto coffee grounds and filters. Steeping is similar to the method of tea bags, though the bags are much larger.

Through its long journey from mountains or jungles, coffee beans go into making up one of the world's most treasured drinks. And with the new research demonstrating the health benefits of moderate consumption, one has even greater reason to be grateful for the effort.

Return from Coffee Beans to Coffee Facts Mainpage

New! Comments