Coffee Bean Processing

Coffee bean processing is more than two thousand years old and has become a major market worldwide. Petroleum is the only commodity with a greater dollar value that coffee.

The plants have two primary classes: Arabica, which was first grown on the Arabian Peninsula, and Robusta, known for having nearly twice the caffeine.

There are, however, many other varieties of beans.

With wine, it is the fruit that is valued, but with the coffee berry, often referred to as a cherry, it is only the bean in the fruit that is valued.

It is the bean that goes through aging, roasting, being ground and then brewed to produce four hundred million cups of coffee enjoyed around the world every day.

There are two principle bean varieties; red and green.

The lower acid content and higher aromatic oil of the red bean makes it the idea bean for making the finest coffees. Because of this, picking is a very important aspect of the bean to shelf life cycle.

The end product is largely affected by the highly valued skill of separating the green and red beans. Laborers hand-pick most of the beans and only pick a few baskets a day.

Once picked, soaking, mechanical rubbing and scouring removes the fruit from the bean. Any remaining flesh is then washed off. The beans produced in this fermentation stage are then laid out over large rock or concrete slabs to sun-dry until their water content is at around 12%.

After the beans are dried, they are sorted by size and color. Although they are sorted by machine more and more, some sorting is still done by hand. Some beans have the skin removed by polishing and others are discarded.

To produce the various select coffees, the beans go through an aging process of three to eight years for some beans and others age for a year or less and are then roasted.

Expanding to about two times their size when dry, the beans crack and change from green to brown in color during the roasting process at 400 degrees Fahrenheit as the interior oil is released.

The basic flavor of the various coffees comes from this oil.

Of course, various techniques for roasting have developed in-house. A distinctive flavor is produced in beans from Kenya and Java by lightly roasting them, for instance.

For several days, the beans produce carbon dioxide after they have been roasted. The beans are then de-gassed by packaging them in shipping bags that are semi-permeable or simply by airing them.

After the beans have finished the previous processes, they are ground. This can be a few weeks after the roasting and de-gassing have been completed.

Grinding the beans has also developed a number of styles with varying results. To obtain a granule of consistent size, burr grinders are used to crush the beans.

For a size that is less homogeneous, choppers chop the beans into smaller pieces. A mortar and pestle is used to pound the beans into a powder-like consistency for Turkish coffee.

The Ground coffee is now ready for brewing. There are nearly as many techniques and styles of brewing as there are brewers. There are four categories that these various styles and techniques fall into: steeping, boiling, gravity and pressure.

Hot water runs through the coffee grounds in the boiling technique and is then filtered or settled. For such pressure methods as espresso, hot water that is a little less than boiling is forced by high pressure through the grounds. Hot water drips onto the coffee grounds in a filter for the drip brew or gravity style of brewing.

Using bigger bags, steeping coffee works much the same as for tea.

Coffee beans go through a long journey to make it from their mountain or jungle origins to a drink prized around the world. There are health benefits being shown by recent research when coffee is consumed in moderation, so there is even more reason to be thankful for the long process in producing it.