The Art and Craft of Coffee (2 page)

• The difference between coffee varieties. Some differences mean distinctive flavor profiles; others indicate different coffee qualities.

• An understanding of many of the world’s coffee-growing regions

< Raw coffee ships in jute or burlap bags. Recently, innovative foil packaging has proven to protect coffee from outside aromas and moisture that affect beans. Further testing and cost will ultimately determine whether burlap will be replaced, but for now burlap rules.

The History of Coffee

To move forward with coffee knowledge, it’s important to look back at coffee’s history. Little is recorded about its origins, though many (like us) venture educated guesses.

Coffee’s Discovery

There’s the often-circulated, unproven story of Kaldi, a goat herder who observed one of his herd chewing on coffee cherries. Soon, the goat began to dance. Kaldi, following his animal’s good judgment, chewed some cherries and found himself similarly energized. Kaldi takes the coffee cherries to a local monastery, where the monks toss them into a fire. Instead of destroying this tool of the Devil, the fire accidentally roasts them, creating the first coffee.

What has been proven is the plant’s likely regional birthplace, either in Ethiopia or Yemen. The word sounds similar to Ethiopia’s Kaffa region, prompting wide acceptance that the term coffee derived from there. Starting in around 600 CE, men of certain nomadic tribes drank a crushed coffee cherry/ghee (butter) mixture to energize before battles. Muslim monks (before Islam released an “official” statement) used the crushed cherries before all-night prayer vigils to reap similar energizing benefits.

Religion Meets Coffee

Acceptance of coffee wasn’t always so widespread. Religious groups had to understand and allow this new, strange drink. Islam wrestled with it first: Should the drink be treated like alcohol, a forbidden, euphoric, but intoxicating drink to avoid, or recognized as a gentle, nutritious, refreshing alternative to alcohol? The latter won out and coffee prevailed throughout the Islamic world.

Its first use as a heated beverage likely occurred around the tenth century in Turkey, where other beverages made by brewing toasted herbs and teas first became popular. With its close proximity and active trade with Europeans, Turkey helped coffee spread into the Christian/European world.

The Catholic Church, which seldom delves officially into dietary matters, became embroiled in whether Christians should partake of this new drink. When pressed for an answer, the reigning pope, Clement VIII, insisted on a sip. He instantly proclaimed coffee a good tasting and healthful beverage for Christians. Jewish law, which frequently declares various foods kosher (in accordance with the religion’s rules and customs), deemed coffee allowable.

Coffee Goes Public

The 1500s brought with them the world’s first coffeehouses in present-day Saudi Arabia. With the go-ahead from the church, peasants could now enjoy coffee without fear of persecution. These public places, known as the Kaveh Kanes, offered Muslim men a sanctuary in which to congregate. Similarly, Europe’s coffeehouses were the province of male bonding, fostering business and political activities. With coffee’s increased popularity came increased clout. In the 1500s, the Turkish placed such importance on coffee that a woman could divorce her husband for failure to provide it for her; it was considered as vital as food and shelter.

Coffee Growing No Longer Just for Arabia

By the late 1600s, coffee—all of which came from Yemen and Ethiopia—was Europeans’ drink of choice. But with the explosion of maritime shipping and colonialism at its peak, nations wanted to control their own coffee-drinking destiny by sourcing beans from home. This control meant independence and new industry.

The Dutch, in the mid-1600s, tried first. When they won control of Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka) in 1658, they began a full-scale coffee industry there; they finally had land on which coffee would grow. In 1699, Dutch colonialists began production in Indonesia, bringing coffee-plant cuttings from India to Java. Curiously, the Dutch did not guard their coffee plant cuttings as carefully as they could have, storing a number in the Amsterdam Botanical Garden and purportedly giving some to other European countries as gifts.

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Meet tomorrow’s coffee trees: coffee seedlings.

If the Dutch shocked historians with their generosity, even more stunning was the liberality of France’s King Louis XIV. Louis distributed cuttings from his single cutting (a gift from the Dutch government in 1714) to various French colonies in the New World. King Louis entrusted infantry officer Captain Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu to take the cuttings to French colonies. This was no easy task. A challenging sea journey became near impossible when coupled with trying to keep a plant alive onboard. De Clieu detailed in his log battles with pirates, a spy on board, storms, drought, and heat. But all along, he nurtured the shoot. Indeed, he claimed his plant survived the difficult voyage only because he shared his water rations with it.

When the boat reached Martinique, the chosen spot for France’s first planting, de Clieu had to make the single plant survive and prosper. He succeeded, motivating local farmers to make coffee, not cocoa, their primary crop. King Louis, who had previously felt lukewarm about de Clieu, honored the man with governorship of Martinique. Meanwhile, cuttings from de Clieu’s plant spread. Soon, all neighboring Caribbean islands possessed coffee, and a new industry was born.

Brazil’s capture of the precious coffee plant from which to build its own empire is equally dramatic. In one account, a Brazilian lieutenant seduces the wife of the governor of French Guiana to obtain a coffee plant cutting supposedly concealed within a bouquet of flowers. This scheme, in 1827, spawned the entire Brazilian coffee industry.

Coffee Meets the Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution, which sought to centralize every process, prompted a shift in coffee making from small batch roasters to the use of large roasters and a packaging system that allowed advance roasting and grinding—known as the coffee can. Coffee pioneer John Arbuckle created the first canned coffee in 1865.

The new consumer age focused on maximizing convenience. By the 1920s, most urban consumers in America and Europe were buying roasted and ground cans of coffee. Technology was improving, making coffee far easier to churn out. Commercial coffee roasters produced more coffee in larger batches and less time. Suddenly, a few could meet the masses’ coffee needs.

The loser in this new era was the coffee’s freshness. Instant coffee, popularized by Nestle in the 1930s, brought the ultimate flavor loss. Like so many foods before it, coffee became a commodity, stressing convenience over taste.

FRENCH COFFEE, ENGLISH TEA

France has long had a flourishing coffee culture, but England is known more for its tea. This may seem strange, especially considering England’s early coffeehouse development. The story is complex. Both France and England developed colonial coffee agriculture. France planted in the Caribbean and on Africa’s Ivory Coast; England planted in Ceylon, (modern-day Sri Lanka).

Ceylon was, at one time, plush with coffee fields. But leaf rust, a fungus that destroys coffee, hit hard. Instead of planting new coffee crops, Ceylon planted tea—which was immune to the leaf rust virus. Back home in England, it became patriotic and fashionable to drink tea. And though France had lower quality coffee than England, the country had plentiful, quality milk. Gradually, France became known for coffee and England (and most of its colonies) for tea.

Fresh-picked coffee cherries, looking delicious enough to eat.

In the 1950s and 60s, coffee joined the ranks of TV dinners, canned fruits and vegetables, and other processed foods. Producing countries started mixing the best coffee with all other coffee. Some great coffee stayed separate from the masses, but that was an exception. The refrigerator’s presence in homes harmed coffee just as much, making available soda and juices—competing instant gratification products.

The Seventies and Beyond

In the 1970s, the focus shifted from convenience back to taste. Baby boomers, born between 1944 and 1961, embraced specialty foods as part of the return to natural, self-absorbed diets and increased leisure time. The new focus touched on every aspect of home cuisine, including coffee. Coupled with this consumer trend was the invention of the air-assisted small batch coffee roasters. Now, even shopping malls could house fresh roasted coffee beans.

Plus, the coffee-shop-alternative-lifestyle-image fit Baby Boomers, who had grown up with beatniks reading poetry in urban coffeehouses. Coffeehouse culture emerged in American cities such as Seattle and Boston. Berkeley, California–based Peet’s Coffee and Tea, founded by Dutch immigrant Alfred Peet, is most often credited for the specialty coffee revolution.

But the rise of specialty coffee meant more than a return of social coffeehouses. Small batch roasters began investigating how to find the best beans. During the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, coffee-growing countries encouraged selling beans from country to country rather than from farm to roaster. New relationships formed. Specialty green coffee buyers began purchasing micro-lots and requesting particular farms’ beans. Small farms started earning awards and honors for their beans.

Separating beans from cherries the old-fashioned way. This process can be done using larger machines, but this one does the job just as well, and it is conveniently portable. Note the ripe cherries in the foreground awaiting their turn.

Specialty coffee appliances underwent a revolution as well. Automatic drip brewing machines replaced the electric percolator, which was once a mainstay in most American households and accused by many connoisseurs of destroying the subtler coffee tastes.

Commodity versus Specialty Coffee

Today’s commercial coffee production may seem like one big mass of beans, but generally, it splits worldwide into commodity and specialty coffee.

Commodity coffee includes everything from price-conscious diner coffee to coffee produced to add its caffeine extract to aspirin. This coffee’s taste is secondary to its purpose, which is to deliver a brown beverage containing caffeine. It may seem unromantic perhaps, but understanding this aspect is necessary to understanding coffee and its terminology.

Specialty coffee is grown, processed, shipped, roasted, sold, and brewed with taste as the primary focus. In general, specialty coffee prices vary so much because they consider production cost as well as taste, a subjective variable. Overall commodity market conditions affect specialty coffee’s price.

No actual botanical or legal distinctions exist between commodity and specialty coffees. In this book, we focus primarily on specialty coffees—not to be snobby, but because it’s more practical.