Coffee and Tea

Have you ever considered the long and daunting process involved in making your favorite coffee? You may be surprised at just how many conditions have to be met and how much work people have to do to present you with your daily coffee fix. You may think that coffee is fairly common and easy to come by. It’s true that it is grown in over 70 countries around the world, including Columbia and Brazil, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to grow. Producing the perfect coffee ‘bean’, which is actually a type of seed, requires very exact conditions.

Coffee ‘beans’ actually come from fruits, which grow on trees that can reach heights of forty-five feet in the wild. However, domestic coffee trees do not usually grow over about twenty feet tall. There are many varieties of coffee, so the plant sizes vary greatly.

Most of the world’s coffee supply is grown between 25 degrees north and south of the equator, in damp, warm regions. That is due to the fact that coffee plants like a warm climate, usually between 60F (15C) and 70F (21C). Coffee plants also like plenty of moisture. Generally, they grow well if they get at least six inches of rain a month. Most coffee plants also thrive in shady areas with light winds.

Robusta, also known as coffea canephora, is the more common type of coffee. It is easier to harvest because it grows well at lower elevations. Coffea arabica, on the other hand, grows in much higher elevations. Coffea arabica is what goes into a gourmet cup of coffee. It tends to be more expensive because it takes longer to grow in the higher elevations and is more difficult to process.

Locating the perfect place and conditions to grow coffee is just the beginning of the battle. There is no instant gratification. Once a coffee crop is planted it generally takes around five years before it is ready to be harvested. Even then, each plant will only produce about two pounds of coffee (1 kilogram). Therefore, many plants are required to make a harvest worthwhile.

From the point that the coffee plants start to blossom with Jasmine-like flowers to the point of harvesting can sometimes take as much as nine months. The process will repeat every year for the coffee tree’s entire life, which is usually around twenty or twenty-five years.

Once the coffee crop is ready for harvesting, even more work begins. Each coffee ‘bean’ has to be hand-picked by workers. The standard equation is that each coffee plant will produce about 2,000 ‘beans’, which all need to be hand-picked by the workers. It may sound to you like picking coffee ‘beans’ might be mindless and simple, but it is an art form. The most skilled coffee pickers learn how to distinguish between good and bad coffee ‘beans’ at a quick glance.

Another thing. which can make a coffee picker’s job even more difficult, is the blossoming period in a particular region. In some areas, such as Brazil, the coffee trees blossom over a six to eight week time frame. In others, such as Kenya, the blossoming period is so long that mature ‘beans’ can be on the same tree as new ones. That means that pickers need to be even more skilled at discerning between good and bad ‘beans’.

The skill and time involved for each coffee ‘bean’ to be hand-picked by a worker is just one of the many reasons that most coffee is expensive.

So, the next time you take a sip of one of the world’s major commodities and wonder why it’s so expensive, take a moment to appreciate how it got to your cup.

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