Coffee: Production.

Madison.

Coffee: from the tree to the cup. In brief, here's a rundown¹ on modern coffee production:

1. Coffee grows on bushy trees native to east Africa, though they've since spread around the world. The red berries are still prized in certain regions, such as Yemen, and are gaining ground in some trendy processed foods, but chances are that most of us will never see one. Until the 14^th century, when someone discovered the magic of the roasted seeds, the berries were the only reason anyone was interested in the trees.
   
   
2. There are two primary types of coffee trees. Coffea arabica - with its two subspecies, var. typica and var. bourbon - is responsible for the good, well-balanced coffees of the world. These trees grow best at high altitudes, generally producing higher quality beans at higher elevations, ideally 5,000 to 7,500 feet above sea level. They're low-volume producers - sometimes as little as a pound per tree per year once mature - that prefer shade, regular rainfall, and warm, steady year-round temperatures.
   
   Coffea canephora, or robusta, on the other hand, is a hardy, disease-resistant tree that produces large quantities of beans, doesn't mind full sun, and makes for a bitter, terrible coffee. The dominant flavors of robusta beans are burnt rubber and wet cardboard.
   
   
3. To produce coffee, the berries are harvested from the trees all at once. Defects - including varying degrees of ripeness, insect damage, mold, etc. - are dealt with through later processing. The berry skins are removed, then the mucilage - the fruity matter - is fermented off. What remains is a pair² of seeds, called beans. At this stage, they're called 'green' beans.
   
   
4. Traditionally, the processors float the beans through a series of channels filled with flowing water to separate them into three (or more) general groups. Denser beans are more desirable than lighter beans, and floaters are completely worthless. This process, though simple, does a pretty good job of sorting out defective beans; better producers and processors will be more careful here, eliminating more beans that they could potentially sell in exchange for a higher quality (and a higher price). The sorted beans are then dried, either on concrete patios in the sun or in mechanical dryers.
   
   
5. This is where the coffee brokers step in. Through a bizarre series of commodities-trading shenanigans³, the Big Four coffee roasters have managed to drive the price of coffee beans very low, but it's still a wild market. In order to get good beans - you can't make bad coffee beans taste good - you have to know the right green brokers. You have to be someone with influence, or hire a person like that in order to even have a chance to taste and buy the best beans.⁴ Roasters purchase green beans by the bag - roughly 60 to 70 kg.⁵ Large quantities of them, usually - at least 10 to 20 bags. Futures are sold in containers, meaning 250 bags, or about 37,500 pounds of coffee beans.
   
   
6. This is when your friendly, neighborhood roaster takes over. A good roaster - i.e., not Starbucks⁶ - will take care to roast beans regularly, providing them to you (or your favorite coffee shop or restaurant) while still fresh. Roasting's a complicated process, if you want to get it right, and takes a lot of skill and practice. A good roaster adjusts the roast profile for each different type of bean, further adjusting to respond to moisture loss as the beans age, aiming to emphasize the best qualities of each particular coffee. There are a great variety of ways to roast coffee, beyond just medium vs. dark roast, and it pays to find a good roaster who can consistently produce the characteristics that you like.
   
   
7. Then, you brew. Coffee brewing has many, many different forms, and I won't pretend to be familiar with all of them. Each tries, in some way, to extract the good parts of the coffee bean in water - about 20% of the bean's weight - while leaving behind the extractible-but-unpleasant bits - another 10% of the bean. (There are a few methods - mostly ancient ones around the Middle East - that leave all of the bean in the cup.)

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¹As I understand it. As a former professional coffee roaster, I've got the notes (and memories) from my former job, as well as Harold McGee's On Food And Cooking for references. That said, a lot of folks disagree over a lot of things when it comes to coffee, in no small part because the professionals - roasters, brokers, etc. - tend to keep their secrets close. For example, out of respect for my former boss, I won't be divulging any of his roasting secrets here.

²Some older trees will start to produce a single seed, called a peaberry. A number of Tanzanian coffees are marketed this way, though it doesn't really mean anything in terms of quality.

³About half of the world's coffee production is bought up by the Big Four: Sara Lee, Kraft, Procter & Gamble and Nestlé. These companies managed to crash the price of coffee by storing large amounts of nigh-undrinkable robusta beans in their warehouses, building it up so that supply exceeded demand.^a Down came the price of coffee futures, destroying the lives of coffee growers around the world. Coffee prices have yet to recover.

^aNote: green coffee beans don't have an exceptional shelf life. Under controlled temperature and humidity, you've got a year or so until they start to lose their good qualities. Not that these beans they withheld - stuff like Vietnamese robusta, which tastes like burnt rubber - had much going for them, but the commodities market didn't care. Those same beans sat in warehouses for years, entirely unusable, serving primarily to increase profits for the Big Four at the expense of the world's coffee growers. Who, it should be noted, are among some of the poorest farmers on the planet.

⁴Brokers are salesmen. They will tell you that the sample of beans that they sent you is the best stuff they have, even if it's the worst. Most small roasters aren't aware that they're never seeing the sort of beans they ought to be roasting; most of them aren't aware that there's anything better than what they're able to get.

⁵You really learn to appreciate how heavy a bag is when you're doing the monthly inventory, weighing bag after bag. A newly opened bag, used for just a few pounds before the end of the month rolled around, was the bane of my existence.

⁶Man, I could rant against Starbucks for days, but I'll limit it to one anecdote:

When I was roasting coffee, we got a shipment of some really great Colombian coffee, called La Florencia. Except that Florencia, in Caquetá, doesn't produce coffee. It was actually a batch of top-notch coffee from Nariño, a nearby department.

Starbucks, in its effort to maximize profits, decided that it would purchase the entire Nariño coffee crop, and made a deal with the processors to lower the price in exchange for buying in bulk. Nariño, like much of Colombia, was already producing coffee for lower prices than beans of similar quality elsewhere, so this represented a serious loss of income, particularly for the high-quality growers. One farmer was so incensed by this that he smuggled his crop to Florencia, selling it there for a price he could afford to live on.

If I recall correctly, we were paying $1.32 per pound for that coffee, and it was a steal. Starbucks was paying less than $1.10 per pound. (Significantly less than a living wage.) So whenever they make some sort of claim about supporting coffee farmers, I know they're lying. Starbucks, as a corporation, doesn't care about the quality of life of coffee growers, unless it can somehow boost their bottom line.

(Here's a map of Colombia, if you're interested.)