The Life of Coffee

Generally speaking, it is generally accepted that coffee was first found in Abyssinia, which is now Ethiopia. According to rumors, an Abyssinian shepherd found that the goat he was raising began to dance after eating some bright red fruit and leaves. Among the facts discovered by Kaldi, some monks also used coffee as a pick-me-up in order to be watchful during late-night prayer meetings. Coffee was probably grown in the sixth century. At first people only ate coffee leaves and beans (then called bunn), but when evolution began to have time for snacks, wine or tea had sprung up, and then a sweet drink called qishr was found to be one of the good snacks. Some people say that the method of roasting and brewing coffee was invented sometime in the sixteenth century and has been used to this day.

Coffee beans are the seeds of coffee cherries. Every winter (dry season) is the harvest time, and there are many ways to harvest red cherries. The bean itself is wrapped in many layers of material, including a silver skin, pergamino-like paper, mucus, mucilage, and its watch case. The interaction between these sweet, sticky substances and the coffee bean itself determines the taste of many coffee beans; the same method is used when the coffee bean is removed from the cherry. Basically, there are three ways to treat coffee beans: wet, dry and semi-wet and semi-dry.

As soon as coffee cherries are picked, they have to be sent to agricultural products for processing. Cherries that have been picked, including freshly ripe, overripe, and unripe, are all mixed together. If these cherries are not treated separately, the quality of the coffee beans is really unpalatable, because it is mixed with a lot of bad-tasting impurities. So these cherries have to be washed and placed in a large trough full of water for preliminary classification. The best coffee has a high density, so it sinks into the water. On the other hand, overripe cherries will surface and can be easily classified. Low-quality coffee is either left for internal consumption or sold to instant coffee producers in the United States or Europe. Unfortunately, those unripe cherries will also sink to the bottom of the water and mingle with those that are already ripe. So cherries that are not yet ripe should be treated with moisture, or it may take a while to use drying to sort them.

In the process of wet treatment, ripe cherries will be squeezed out of the juice. If handled properly, only ripe cherries will be squeezed out of the pulp, and unripe hard cherries will be distinguished. The beans should be sent to the fermentation tank and soaked in water for about 8-20 hours.

At this time, the sticky liquid in the coffee beans has been filtered out. Coffee beans produced by wet treatment are characterized by bright and clean taste. But compared with the coffee beans produced by drying, they are not so fragrant and strong.

When the mucus is removed from the fermentation tank, the coffee is either left on the terrace to dry naturally, or dried by machine, or both. Almost all coffee producing areas are treated mainly by drying, because the difference between coffee beans produced by this method is very small. The main purpose of this treatment is to prevent the beans from fermenting so that the coffee beans do not produce mold with an abominable taste of wet soft fruit.

If the wet treatment method is not used, the drying method (natural treatment) can be used because the weather conditions in some areas are suitable for manufacturers. After the cherry seeds split inside, especially after the sticky substance is removed, coffee beans can be simply dried, dried on a large terrace or dried by machine. Using this method, it takes a little longer and is easier to ferment. In any case, because dried coffee beans always come into contact with sweet mucus for a long time, so processed coffee beans will be sweeter and heavier. The acidity, cleanliness, and taste of coffee usually disappear during processing. Coffee beans that are naturally treated are usually used to make espresso (espresso).

The third method called semi-wet treatment (natural removal of pulp) is a relatively new and rare method. This method is also suitable for processing local coffee only in specific areas of some countries where there is a long drying period in the climate. The coffee produced by this method is sticky, and the mucus is not removed with fermentation in the tank. Therefore, the coffee produced by this semi-wet treatment contains the characteristics of both wet treatment and drying treatment. The acidity, sweetness, seasoning, and flavor of such coffee are quite good; the only thing is that such coffee is not as strong as coffee produced by pure dry or wet treatment.

When the coffee bean is dry, put it in a rattan frame with a vine shed as the top. It is not opened until a shelling program is operated before it is shipped out. The purpose of this is to keep the flavor and taste of the coffee intact. After shelling, the coffee beans, in 60 kilograms, are packed in a burlap bag, ready for export.

Next, the importers of the coffee will send the coffee to the manufacturers in the country for baking. The roasting of coffee is the most important process for the development of its own flavor. The flavor of coffee itself also changes its taste, bean body, aroma, and acidity as it is roasted. Light roasting produces many flavors, aromas, and acidity, while heavy roasting produces thicker beans and brews a more intriguing cup of coffee. It is a pity that heavy-roasted coffee is basically to stabilize the quality of coffee beans, so it is difficult to hide the defects of coffee beans.

After roasting, coffee beans can be prepared and cooked in a variety of ways; some are cooked by espresso machines, or by French pressing, in vacuum pots, by dripping, and so on. And a variety of different cooking methods are to grind the coffee beans into different coarse and fine particles. Since coffee is easy to lose fresh products, the most important technique for grinding coffee is to drink as much as you can. At present, there is no kind of packaging on the market to preserve the taste of ground coffee powder.

The taste of coffee itself is quite controlled by the way it is brewed. The coffee brewed with Espresso has a heavy taste, a strong flavor and a complicated process. On the other hand, the coffee brewed with dripping water is cleaner and brighter, and retains more original flavor. French compressed brewed coffee retains almost all the original flavor, as well as the unique complexity of the coffee itself, but the acidity is slightly missing. If you use a vacuum pot to brew the coffee, it is clean and the flavor is fully preserved. In fact, for every cooking method, if you want to taste good, the temperature and time are the most important.