Coffee Beverages

Today, coffee is ubiquitous, offered everywhere from coffee kiosks to restaurants, from hot and black to iced frappe. Many consumers affectionately refer to it as ‘Joe' or ‘Java', but just do not get in between them and their morning cup of coffee. This newfound coffee culture has started to spread to the rest of the world making consumers more knowledgeable about coffee, its country of origin, and the various ways to prepare this fabulous drink. The Italian cappuccino, the deep, rich French Roast, Caribbean blends, Sumatran blends, coffee beans from Costa Rica, Scandinavia, Africa and Germany all cater to a different taste Today you can find great coffee in every major city of the world, from London to Sydney to Tokyo. Tomorrow, no doubt, millions will be enjoying their favorite brew.

Roasting

The green coffee beans have no flavor or aroma and are just at this stage merely pale green shadows of their future dark brown selves. All of the flavor and aroma that we enjoy in coffee is a by-product of roasting the beans.

Heating green coffee beans between 180ºC and 240ºC for 8 to 15 minutes, determines the degree of roast. The longer the coffee roasts, the darker it becomes. During the roasting process moisture is lost and the bean "pops" audibly rather like popcorn. A chemical reaction takes place--starches convert into sugar, proteins are broken down, and there is an altering of the cellular structure of the bean. The heating process precipitates the release of coffee oil or "caffeol", which is the essence of coffee.

History

It starts in the Horn of Africa, in Ethiopia, where the coffee tree probably originated in the province of Kaffa. There are various fanciful but unlikely stories surrounding the discovery of the properties of roasted coffee beans. One story has it that an Ethiopian goatherd was amazed at the lively behavior of his goats after chewing red coffee berries. What we know with more certainty is that slaves were transported from present day Sudan, through the great port of Mocha (now synonymous with coffee), and into Yemen and Arabia. Along the way, they ate the succulent outer cherry flesh of the red coffee berries. Coffee was certainly being cultivated in Yemen by the 15th century and probably much earlier than that.

Mocha was also the main port for the single sea route to Mecca, and was the busiest place in the world at the time. However, the Arabs had a strict policy not to export any fertile beans, so that coffee could not be cultivated anywhere else. The coffee bean is the seed of the coffee tree, but when stripped of its outer layers it becomes infertile. The race to make off with some live coffee trees or beans was eventually won by the Dutch in 1616, who brought some back to Holland where they were grown in greenhouses.