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Information About The Processing Of Coffee

By Debrah Elliot


Maybe before you take a sip of that coffee you are drinking it would interest you to know some facts about this brew such as the fact that around 400 billion cups of coffee are being consumed worldwide every year. Yes, that is how popular coffee is! If you check the records you will even find that coffee expenditure in Great Britain overtook the amount spent for their tea in 1998.

The tropical evergreen belonging to the genus "Coffea" which is part of the classification family of "Rubiaceae" is where your coffee comes from. About 60 plants under this genus have been discovered to exist but only three varieties are harvested commercially, including Robusta, Arabica and small amounts of Libeca. Maybe if you live in places like the tropic Latin America, Asia and Africa then you are familiar with the coffee plant. Coffee that is commercially produced can be found cultivated and grown between the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer only. In the United States, Hawaii is only state producing coffee.

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.

The extraction of coffee beans from the berries calls for two methods to choose from and one is dry and one is wet. For the first method, you are required to dry the berries under the sun for a really long period, usually several weeks, until the berries turn to brown and harden up. The second one which is the wet method involves soaking the berries in water for several days before you can dry them up under the sun or if you have a drying machine, you can have them dried here. Most prefer the dry method because this is easier and is at the same time cheaper.

Your coffee flavors often depend on another part of the coffee processing and that is the roasting. As after extraction the coffee beans may still be in its green state, they are roasted and later being classified according to their darkness or lightness where many coffee drinkers in the US actually prefer light roasts. In some cases, in order to ensure fresher product, coffee beans are being exported while it is in its green state and the receiving end does the roasting instead.

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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