About Coffee

Coffee is the office sanity-saver, the wonder drink that eases the tension, soaks up the stress and relieves boredom. There are on this earth more than one billion coffee drinkers,; at least one quarter of the worlds population drinks coffee. It is produced in 50 countries in the warm tropical belt that encircles the globe.

According to figures supplied by the London coffee information centre, Finland consumes annually 12.9 kilograms of coffee per head, per year. That means that an average of 12 cups of coffee per person per day are consumed. Sweden downs 12 kilograms, Denmark 11.2 kilograms, Netherlands 8.2 kilograms, West Germany 6.8 kilograms, Austria 6.4 kilograms, France 5.9 kilograms, the United States 4.9 kilograms and Australia a little further down the list with only 2 kilograms.

In Australia the good times with coffee came with the influx of Continental migrants, particularly the Italians and Greeks who raised the standard of coffee drinking across the nation. The espresso craze in Australia first hit around the 1955-56 period and now Australian's are drinking 17 million cups of coffee per day.

The coffee tree is one of the most ingenious of God's creations. It blossoms and produces berries at the same time. It can fruit once a year, or anything up to five times a year depending on the altitude at which it is grown.

What does it look like? A coffee tree is rather small for a tree and rather large for a shrub. It varies from two to four metres high. It is an evergreen with spear shaped leaves, which are waxy and bright. The blossom lasts for only two or three days but then little green berries appear, which ultimately turn bright red. This is why coffee people always talk about coffee cherries. All the cherries do not ripen on the tree at the one time. If you pick the beans too late then the coffee is poor and spoilt. If you pick the beans too early, they will never ripen.

The best coffee needs to be picked by hand - many hands. Coffee is labour intensive and this is why for hundereds of years it has been grown in areas where labour is cheap.

You can grow coffee trees in your backyard but you need a special backyard. There should be no frost. It likes a year round temperature of 20-25 degrees Celsius - warm but not to hot. As for soil, they prefer a deep volcanic soil with lots of humus and a healthy rainfall.

The trees like sunlight but not too much; partial sunlight during the day is best. That is the reason coffee grows so well at high altitudes; it tends to get shade from the mountains and high level cloud cover. At low altitudes it is best to give it protection from the other trees. Young coffee seedlings are propagated in nurseries and when they are nearly a year old they are transplanted into fields where they are put in deep well-manured holes about three metres apart. The coffee cherry itself is interesting, it looks like a cherry, but that is where the similarity ends. Under the red skin there is a yellowish, sweet, gummy pulp and inside, two green beans which face each other. The beans are covered with a skin called 'silver skin'.

Coffee Beans

There are three main varieties of beans. Actually, there are at least 50 different types of coffee trees, but only a few of them are commercially important.

Coffea Arabica
This is the coffee tree originally found in Ethiopia, the one that spread to Java, Sumatra, India, Arabia, the West Indies and Latin America. It remains the premium coffee and Arabica grown at high altitude is slower growing, thereby developing more of the flavour components so important to good coffee.

Coffea Liberica
Liberica is a native of Liberia, a large plant - very hardy and disease resistant. It can be grown right down at sea level in the most difficult areas. It is produced mainly in Liberia but also parts of Java, Malaysia and the Philippines. The yield is low and the flavour the poorest of the three varieties. Little is exported and it is useful mainly for blending.

Coffea Robusta
Coffea Robusta came to the world when the coffee plantations of India and the Middle East were being devastated by disease. A scientist, Emile Laurant, discovered a different coffee tree growing wild in the Belgian Congo. It had many advantages - it was resistant to disease and matured more quickly and could produce fruit in two to three years. Furthermore, it provided multiple crops each year. Robusta would flourish at altitudes below 1000 metres and was ideal for tropical domestic Africa.
Robusta has become popular with large roasting companies for its cheap price, and it is ideal for instant coffee. However, Robusta certainly does not have the flavour and aroma of Arabica.

Coffee Prices

There is a theory that coffee operates on a five to seven year cycle. When the trees come to fruition there is a coffee glut, prices fall, coffee farmers are ruined, trees are burned and so it all starts over again. On the 17th of July 1975, Brazil had its worst frost in history and lost two thirds of its entire crop. Consequently, coffee prices skyrocketed.

The sale of coffee beans is becoming more and more complex. Many of the merchants buy and sell on the futures market; that is they estimate trends, the market, the weather and settle on a price for so many bags to be delivered in two years time. It is a delicate business, like estimating the future of gold, the dollar or oil.

Coffee prices however are usually less volatile than any other "soft" commodity, and generally as stable as "hard" commodities. The international trade is now so large that it is second only to oil in dollars traded per annum, and there is even a seperate futures exchange in New York dealing in Coffee Sugar and Cocoa (CSCE).

Caffeine and decaffeination

Perhaps the most important thing to know about coffee and caffeine is that the strength of the coffee's taste has little or nothing to do with how much caffeine it contains. While caffeine itself has a slightly bitter flavour, our perception of strength comes partly from the degree of the roast (the darker the roast, the "stronger" the flavour), but mostly from the ratio of coffee to water used during the brewing process which creates the actual strength of the beverage.

Caffeine content of a cup of regular espresso coffee will range from 90 to 120mg, depending on the types of coffee used in the blends and the strength of the brew. The roasting process alters caffeine very little. It is readily water soluble at temperatures above 170F and consequently is fully released into the finished beverages during brewing.

Caffeine varies between species of coffee trees. Arabica coffee contains about one percent caffeine by weight in green form, while robusta beans contain about two percent by weight.

The decaffeination methods must remove 97-99 percent of the caffeine present in order for the coffee to be sold as decaffeinated. This is 97-99% of the original caffeine content, meaning that decaffeinated coffees are for all practical purposes, caffeine free. While a cup of regular coffee might contain 100mg or more of caffeine, a typical cup of decaffeinated contains less than 3mg.