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| STALKING THE BEAN | |||
Cappuccino, frappuccino, skinny latté or tall Colombian with chocolate dust… there's more to coffee than simply starting the day... |
"Coffee is what makes civilised life possible." We sure can identify with that. At any given point in the day you can see our staff frantically clutching their coffee of choice. Which got us thinking: where does coffee actually come from? Clearly we just amble across the street and order a "Tall latte to go" and it arrives perfectly packaged. Just add sugar. We've decided that something so good has to be an art form. We chatted to the guys at Beaver Creek Estate, a coffee farm in Kwazulu-Natal who gave us the run down on the whole process from seedling to mug.
Stage 1: White blossom Blossoms develop in clusters on the branches. They are white in colour and smell similar to jasmine. They last for a few days and then fall off. In their place small green cherries begin to develop and will take several months to ripen.
Stage 2: Red bean The fruit is called a cherry because of its similarity to an actual cherry. This is the stage that the ripe coffee is picked from the tree by hand. The cherry then moves through a pulper, which removes the skin and most of the pulp. This is a sticky substance which becomes a mucileage layer close to the coffee beans. In the next stage, two seeds are separated from one cherry, with part of the mucileage remaining on the beans. They are then fermented to break down the remaining mucileage layer by natural enzymes during a 24 hour soaking period. They are then washed and rinsed until the sticky mucileage layer is removed and the water drains away clean.
Stage 3: Outshell dried bean The beans are placed out into the sun to dry for two to three weeks, turned and raked for even drying. The beans remain in the sun until their moisture content is about 11-12 percent. During this period the final two layers, parchment and silver skin, begin to separate from the final green bean.
Stage 4: Green bean Once dry, the beans are placed into a huller where the final two layers are removed to expose the final green bean, raw coffee ready for roasting. From here different roasts are formed.
Stage 5: The Alchemy of Roasting
The roasting of coffee is more of an art than a science. Each roaster has an unique system for naming the roasts. The most frequently used terms, from lightest to darkest, are light (cinnamon), medium (American roast), dark (French) and Italian (espresso roast).
| story from Men's Health | |
| image by bean | |
