CHAPTER 3

The Journey from Tree to Table

While coffee’s journey from where it is grown to the coffee drinker’s cup may not be as perilous or fraught with danger as the journey centuries ago from its discovery to worldwide enjoyment, there are still many steps from coffee tree to your brewer. Ten steps, to be exact, according to the National Coffee Association USA (NCA).¹

Everything starts, as it so often does, with a seed. Coffee beans are the seeds of the coffee plant. These are the same beans that are dried, roasted, and ground to make the perfect brew of coffee. Without all of this processing, the bean stays a seed that can be planted to grow more coffee plants. Young coffee plants need just the right amount of sun, shade, moisture, and fertilizer to produce an abundant crop.

After at least three years, the coffee plants produce fruit, the coffee cherry. When it is ready to be picked, it turns a bright red. The plants usually yield one harvest a year, but there can be a second harvest in some countries, like Colombia, for instance. The arduous task of picking the coffee cherries comes next. Usually the coffee is harvested by hand, which is a very painstaking process. In places where the terrain is more level, machinery can be used to harvest the fruit.

There are two ways to gather the coffee: strip picking—where each and every cherry is picked from the tree—or selective picking—where only the cherries that are ripe are picked; this is done by hand. This method is used mostly for the arabica beans, which are descended from the original Ethiopian coffee plants and bring high prices in the marketplace.² According to the NCA, “A good picker averages approximately 100 to 200 pounds of coffee cherries a day, which will produce 20 to 40 pounds of coffee beans. Each worker’s daily haul is carefully weighed, and each picker is paid on the merit of his or her work.”³

The third step in the coffee plant-to-cup method is processing. This has to be done fast so the fruit doesn’t spoil. There are two ways to process the coffee cherries: the dry method and the wet method. With the dry method, which is useful in places where water is scarce, the coffee fruit is strewn about on immense surfaces to be sun dried. The fruit must be covered from the rain and during the night to protect it. This method can take weeks.

With the wet method, a pulping machine removes the pulp and skin from the beans; then the beans travel through troughs of water, and the heavy, ripe beans go to the bottom while the beans that are not quite ripe drift upward. After passing through spinning drums, the beans are deposited into fermentation tanks that further slough off more layers of material clinging to the beans.⁴

The fourth step is drying the beans (if the wet processing method has been used). The beans can be dried by the warmth of the sun or with a tumble dryer. At this point the dried beans are referred to as parchment coffee.

The fifth step is milling. As the NCA says, “hulling machinery removes the parchment layer (endocarp) from wet processed coffee. Hulling dry processed coffee refers to removing the entire dried husk—the exocarp, mesocarp, and endocarp—of the dried cherries.”⁵

An elective step in the milling process involves polishing the beans. After the beans have been hulled, any silver skin still on the beans is removed. While polished beans are thought to be of a better quality than unpolished beans, there really is hardly any difference between the two. Next comes grading and sorting. This involves sorting by weight, size, and imperfections in color and such.

Then comes the exporting of the beans, which at this point are called green coffee. The green coffee is put into sisal or jute bags and shipped.⁶

The next step is tasting, which doesn’t refer to sipping a cup of coffee that has been brewed at home or in a coffee shop—this is something entirely different. This tasting is called cupping, a way to accurately assess the quality of the coffee. As the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) explains, there is a strict protocol to cupping.⁷

The cupper visually inspects the beans. Some beans are then roasted in a small roaster, ground right away, and put into boiling water. The aroma of this little brew is very important. The cupper tastes the mixture after checking the aroma again—there is a special way the coffee is tasted. This is a very involved and very important process and requires a well-trained cupper. Says the NCA: “Coffees are not only analyzed to determine their characteristics and flaws, but also for the purpose of blending different beans or creating the proper roast. An expert cupper can taste hundreds of samples of coffee a day and still taste the subtle differences between them.”⁸

Roasting, the process by which the green beans become the heady and fragrant coffee beans we all know and love, comes next. The beans are kept constantly moving in an oven that is 550 degrees Fahrenheit. Not long after, the oily and aromatic caffeol comes out of the beans.

Grinding the beans comes next, and how fine or coarse the grind is depends on the brewing method: “The length of time the grounds will be in contact with water determines the ideal grade of grind. Generally, the finer the grind, the more quickly the coffee should be prepared. That’s why coffee ground for an espresso machine is much finer than coffee brewed in a drip system. Espresso machines use 132 pounds per square inch of pressure to extract coffee.”⁹

Lastly, comes the brewing, and everyone is familiar with this.

Manés Alves’s Coffee Lab International works with clients and their roasting partners as an independent Quality Assurance lab, which is crucial, according to their website: “Underlying coffee quality problems can be complex; from the integrity of the green beans, improper storage, and inconsistencies between roasts; to packaging deficiencies, blends that are out of spec, equipment issues, and lack of proper staff training.”¹⁰

Things can go wrong during any one of the steps, including things that can affect the taste of the coffee at the end of its journey. The different steps have to be done at the right times, starting with the planting.

The coffee that is planted, of course, has to be adapted to the area where it is going to grow. Some plants are, to a certain extent, more hardy and pest resistant, but they are often not the best for cupping. While they are good in terms of yield, they are not so good in terms of quality.

“After you pick the coffee, the quality is there,” Alves said. “There’s nothing else you can do to improve it . . . The only thing you can do is actually destroy it. Destroy the quality that is already there. It’s actually much easier to destroy the quality than preserve the quality.”

At the hulling stage the quality can be maintained or lost. Same with storage and with the journey from where it was produced to where it is being shipped. “Let’s say your coffee comes from Kenya,” Alves explained. “If you don’t have the coffee inside a plastic container, by the time it gets here it’s going to be at least four points lower. Imagine you score the coffee at ninety. By the time the coffee gets here it’s going to be an eighty-six.”¹¹

Roasting is another stage where missteps can happen and affect the coffee quality. Roasting slipups are, according to Alves, a huge problem. This usually happens more frequently with small roasters that do not have the tools to figure out how to be consistent from roast to roast. Alves said that there are different color meters that can be used to show what color has been achieved when the coffee is roasted. Twenty or so years ago the least expensive of these tools would cost $20,000. Now they are available for around $2,000 and do the same thing.

Blends can also be out of spec. And what is that? A blend out of spec means that a certain type of blend has been set up with a certain type of flavor profile. If, when the coffee is tasted, the tasters find that the blend does not hit all the different points that it is supposed to hit, the blend is out of spec.

So concludes a very condensed version of the journey of coffee from where it is planted and grown to your cup. Now, about that single serve . . .