Coffee Bean - Coffee Bean Plant to Coffee Cup

From its origins over two thousand years ago, Coffee Bean processing has grown into a worldwide market whose output as a commodity has a dollar value second only to oil.

There are numerous different varieties of coffee bean, but as far as the coffee bean plant is concerned, there are only two classes. These are the Arabica, first cultivated on the Arabian Peninsula, and the Robusta which contains about twice the caffeine.

By contrast to wine, coffee beans or coffee cherrys are not valued for their fruit, but only for the bean inside. It is that bean that is aged, roasted, ground and brewed to make the 400 million cups of coffee consumed around the world per day.

The two varieties of coffee bean are green and red. The red bean has a higher aromatic oil and lower acid content than the green and is used to produce the finer coffees. In view of the difference between the two types of bean the most important stage in the life cycle of coffee beans is the picking.

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

From there the coffee 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.

During the 400-degree Fahrenheit roasting the coffee 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. Coffee beans from Java and Kenya, for example, are often lightly roasted producing a distinctive flavor. After roasting, the beans produce carbon dioxide for several days so the beans are 'de-gassed' either by airing or packaging in semi-permeable shipping bags.

The resulting 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.

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.