Keep going

Posted August 10th, 2009

Do you ever take time to step back from something you do all the time and wonder "How did anyone ever think of that?"

I wonder that sometimes about coffee. Here's a picture that my friend Rainer Brockerhoff took of coffee cherries on a tree in Brazil. 

And here's a collection that has just been harvested.

They are beautiful, but how do we get from the tree to the cup?

For the most part the fruit is not eaten, we want the bean inside. So the first step is to remove the fruit without damaging the bean. The two main choices are a wet process and a dry process (there is also a much less used process that involves recovering digested beans from animals that have swallowed the cherries).

You can purchase beans at this point. We call them green but they are often a yellowish or khaki color. They can be stored for a long time in this state. They are hard. You can't eat them and there's not much you could do to get a useful beverage from them.

So the next step is to roast them. You can roast beans at home in your oven or on a stove top or using a hot air popcorn popper. You'll get a lot of smoke and need some good ventilation (yes I found this out the hard way). You can also get home roasters of various methods, sizes, and prices. I've used a small fluid bed roaster and a drum roaster. One advantage of these devices is that I can take them outside and roast in our back yard. The other is that the temperature and agitation of the beans is kept consistent enough that you can produce a very good roast with minimal expertise or attention.

In the latest edition of the Prag Pub magazine, I've shown you how to roast coffee beans on a grill. You don't even need an expensive grill. I've done it in a small $40 grill with just a little bit of charcoal and made some excellent coffee. From start to finish, including lighting the fire, the whole process took a little over half an hour.

Once the beans have been roasted, they need to be ground before you brew them. The consistency of the grind should match the brewing method. A French Press grind is coarser than a Vacuum Pot grind which is coarser than a Percolator grind which is coarser than a Drip grind which is coarser than an Espresso grind. And finally you add water at roughly the right temperature to this ground coffee for roughly the right amount of time (which also varies depending on the brew method).

The result is the perfect cup of coffee that I drink each morning — pausing only now and then to wonder "How did anyone ever think of that".

Really, I suppose the question is, why didn't people stop sooner. Why didn't people taste the coffee cherry and decide "nope, that's not for me." What made them press on. Of course we probably assume that there was a collection of cherries that were naturally dry processed that someone picked up. At this point the fruit wasn't in good enough shape so someone might have cleaned the last bits of fruit away and tried to eat the seed. When that didn't work, someone had to think of throwing the seeds into the fire. 

From this point on I kind of get the process. The smell of roasting coffee beans is intoxicating. Munching on the beans isn't unpleasant although some of the early experimenters probably found that they had difficulty sleeping and were up late nights hunting and gathering. Infusing in a beverage probably followed the same path as other hot liquids we enjoy today.

Even though there is a believable path from the tree to my cup, there are so many places the process could have been abandoned. That's the other thing I think about as I drink my morning cup of coffee. What pursuits might I be stopping too soon because I haven't seen early success? Maybe I need to take another look and ask, "that didn't work, now what". Maybe I need to look at the failures in the light of "oh what would this be good for". 

This post originally appeared in the Pragmatic Life blog.