Sunday, November 24, 2013

The Truths About How Your Coffee Is Processed

By Debrah Elliot


Before you drink that cup of coffee you are holding, take note of several interesting facts about coffee - the first being that there are about 400 billion cups of coffee being drunk annually all over the world. That is the vastness of coffee lovers and drinkers worldwide! In fact, in the year 1998, coffee expenditure overtook the amount spent for tea in Great Britain.

It might interest you to know that your coffee is from the coffee plant that is a tropical evergreen of "Coffea" genus and belonging to the "Rubiaceae" family. Although there are actually about 50 or more plants under this genus, only three are being harvested commercially which are Arabica, Robusta and Libeca. It is quite easy to find a coffee plant if you live in areas within the tropical Latin America, Asia and Africa. It is between the Tropic of Capricorn and the Tropic of Cancer that all the commercially produced coffee is cultivated and grown. As for the U.S., coffee can be found cultivated in Hawaii only as this is the only spot falling between those two tropics.

When you try to break open the fruit of the coffee plant you will find two seeds looking like beans when separated that is covered by pulp and skin hence the common term used "coffee beans." The truth to the matter is that it isn't a bean, but the inside of a berry. The harvesting of these coffee berries can be very tedious. They don't ripen altogether at the same time which is why they are mostly picked by hand, harvested only when truly ripe. While there are mechanical picker machines many coffee plantation owners still prefer hand picking because these machines are not as efficient.

In extracting the coffee beans from the berry, one may use either of the two methods - dry processing or the wet method. The dry method as its name suggests calls for drying the berries under the sun which is rather lengthy because you will have to wait until it is hard and brown and that could mean several weeks of drying. The latter method requires soaking the berries in water for several days before letting them dry under the sun or in a drying machine if you have one. Most often, the dry method for processing is being opted over the wet method when extracting the beans because this is easier and cheaper.

The process does not end there of course as there is still that one important part - the one which determines the flavors of your coffee, the roasting! From its green state, the coffee beans are roasted and coffee is often classified according to how dark it is roasted. The light roasts are highly popular in the United States. Exported green coffee beans ensure fresher product as its roasting takes place in the very place it is roasted, ground and sold as coffee.

If you reside in the Los Angeles area, one Culver City coffee shop produces some of the best coffee drinks in the area. At Island Monarch Coffee, the coffee is only the finest imported coffee beans from South America and Kona, Hawaii. Coffee drinkers will delight in the fact that each cup comes fresh because the grinding of the coffee beans take place in their shop itself after placing one's order for a cup. Water is guaranteed purified through the process of reverse osmosis as well. Not only are the beans freshly ground, they aren't roasted until just a few days before you drink your coffee, so it is truly the freshest cup of coffee in the area.




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