Mocha, Joe, mud, kopi, Java - no matter what you call it, coffee is not the first thing a Mexican reaches for in the morning. Probably born from its Scandinavian antecedents, coffee - with perhaps a little milk and sugar - is the breakfast of preference in America. The Brits prefer tea with sugar and milk. In France, a short shot of vin blanc is not unusual. In Italy, cappuccino con grappa might be preferred. To Germans, breakfast beer is a delight. Elsewhere, in Vienna for instance, strong coffee is poured simultaneously into a heated cup with scalded milk. The Mexican might prefer hot chocolate or vanilla-flavored atole.
The major types of commercial coffee are the arabicas and the robustas. In the western hemisphere the arabicas are subdivided into Brazils and milds. Robustas are produced in the eastern hemisphere exclusively, together with substantial quantities of arabicas. The Brazils consist principally of Santos, Paraná, and Rio, named for the ports from which they are shipped. Milds are identified by the names of countries or districts in which they are grown, such as Medellín, Armenia, and Manizales coffees from Colombia.
Green (unroasted) coffee beans are a major import of the United States; about two-thirds of the total comes from Central and South America, with Brazil and Colombia the two largest suppliers. After petroleum, coffee is the largest industry in Latin America.
Several varieties of green coffee are usually blended and roasted together to produce the tastes, aromas, and flavors popular with consumers. As a rule ripe beans are heated in rotating, horizontal drums that provide a tumbling action to prevent uneven heating or scorching. Temperatures for roasting range from about 193°C (about 380°F) for a light roast, through about 205° C (about 400°F) for a medium roast, to about 218°C (about 425° F) for a dark roast. The roasted beans are cooled rapidly. Roasted coffee may be packaged and shipped to retail stores which custom grind it for the customers on purchase, or it may be ground in plate- or roller-type grinding mills before shipment.
Ground coffee loses its unique flavor within about a week unless it is specially packaged. Plastic-and-paper combinations are popular packaging media that afford protection to freshly roasted and ground coffee. Hermetically sealed vacuum or pressure cans keep coffee fresh for up to three years.
Various coffee blends have highly individualistic flavors, making companies like Starbuck's successful. Here in Mexico the many varieties are exemplified by the selection available in our super markets. My favorite coffee was one I found while living in eastern Saudi Arabia some years ago. The coffee merchant, a turbaned Yemani, was sitting beside a burlap bag of green beans at street side. I handed him a few coins and he scooped me out a few beans. For another coin, he put the beans in an empty coffee can and held them over a charcoal fire until he judged them done. He then put them in a brass mortar, and pulverized them with loud clinking and clanging with a brass pestle. The result was a delightful brew when boiled briefly in clear water. I say "clear water" advisably, for much water in Saudi Arabia is not that.
I am sure that there is a stray Yemini somewhere in Mexico with a bag of coffee and appurtenances, but have yet to find him. So my solution for the nonce is a product by Nescafe called Mokaccino. This is a foamy sort of instant cappuccino that comes ten packets per package. It, also, should be mixed with clear water, not tap water!
Exactly where and when coffee was first cultivated is not known, but some authorities believe that it was grown initially in Arabia near the Red Sea about 675 A.D.. In the 15th and 16th centuries, extensive plantings occurred in the Yemen region of Arabia. The consumption of coffee increased in Europe during the 17th century, prompting the Dutch to cultivate it in their colonies and in 1714 the French succeeded in bringing a live cutting of a coffee tree to the island of Martinique in the West Indies. This single plant was the genesis of the great coffee plantations of Latin America.
The shrub, a genus of trees of the madder family, grows well from sea level to the frost line, and now thrives in Java, Sumatra, Arabia, India, Africa, the West Indies, and in Central and South America. Latin America, where Arabian coffee is grown, produces two-thirds of the world's supply. Six or seven months after flowering, the fruit appears, changing from green to deep crimson as the berries ripen, resembling cherries. It takes five or six years for mature fruit to be produced, and the trees bear for 15 to 20 years thereafter. Picking is selective and labor intensive, resulting in high prices.
The beans contain caffeine, which can be removed by treating the green beans with chlorinated hydrocarbon. After treatment the beans are then roasted as usual, but they never reach the robust flavor preferred by devoted coffeephobes. Decaffeinated coffee is preferred by people who believe themselves hypersensitive to caffeine. Colombian coffee is perhaps the most famous of the world's coffees, thanks to the fictional character Juan Valdez and his amicable donkey who have given Colombian coffee a friendly face since they started appearing in commercials. Experts deduce coffee plants were introduced by Jesuit priests in the mid-16th century. However it wasn't until about 1835 that Columbia first exported coffee to the U.S. Today, Colombia exports nearly 10 million bags each year, and it is the world's third leading exporter of coffee behind Brazil and Vietnam.
Coffee thrives when grown at high altitudes in warm weather and Colombia offers the perfect environment. The tree that produces the beans which make Arabica coffee (the Coffea Arabica tree) thrives in a shaded area with well drained soil. Colombia's mountainous terrain, with its rich volcanic dirt, provides what the coffee tree needs especially when grown under the shade of rubber and banana trees, producing the rich, full-bodied coffee used in coffeehouses and residences worldwide.
PROCESSING COFFEES
Dry-Process: Dry-processed (naturally processed) coffees are dried in contact with the sweet mucilage of the cherry, making the coffee heavy in body, sweet, smooth, and complex. Because his coffee process is one of the most difficult due to the long drying times, Brazil has invested significant time and money to developing new drying systems and drying practices to prevent fermentation.
Wet-Process: Wet-processing coffees is a relatively new method of removing the four layers surrounding the coffee bean. This process results in a coffee that is cleaner, brighter, and fruitier. Wet-processing is done in a relatively small proportion to dry-processing in Brazil, and offers another brighter dimension to Brazilian coffees.
Pulped Natural:
Many of you have a morning "cuppa" at the snack bar on the Lake Chapala Society grounds. Others gather at Dona Donuts, Salvador's, Sonrisa's, La Jardin and at coffee shops in Jocotepec, San Juan Cosalá, Chapala and San Antonio. Wherever you partake, please take your own china cup, for paper or plastics add their peculiar after-taste to coffee. My favorite cup carries the logo, "DON'T MESS WITH TEXAS".
The pulped natural method consists of removing the cherry and the silver skin around the bean. This results in a beverage that has characteristics of both a dry- and wet-processed coffee. It is often sweeter than wet-processed coffees, has some of the body of a dry-processed coffee, but also retains some of the acidity of a wet-processed coffee. This type of processing can only occur in countries where the humidity is low and the coffee covered in the sweet mucilage can be spread out and dried rapidly in the sun without fermenting. Brazil has made this method famous and produces some of the best pulped-natural coffees in the world. All 20 winners of the Gourmet Cup competition in Brazil in 2000 processed their coffees using the pulped natural method.
