In some extreme circumstances it’s not uncommon for parchment coffee to pass through half-a-dozen hands before leaving its country of origin as graded green coffee, so it’s not difficult to see why most farmers only receive a fraction of the coffee’s final selling price. Many speciality roasters have now established direct-trade relationships with farms to better understand where their coffee has come from and to ensure the farm receives fair payment for their work. Don’t be fooled by a name though; this is not a fairy-tale picture of cheerful farmers packing up containers of coffee and sending them to the door of an expectant roaster. The direct-trade relationship is more about transparency, when a farmer, miller, exporter, importer, and roaster all work together towards a more sustainable industry model. Crucially though, the roaster and farmer agree upon a fair(er) payment, and the services of the other trade partners are paid for separately.
The grading and sorting of beans is still conducted by hand and eye in many countries, including the birthplace of coffee, Ethiopia.
MILLING
Once the coffee arrives at the mill, it is first passed along a vibrating platform that removes any dry debris that may have been loaded into the bag. Next it is hulled of its parchment in a large blenderlike contraption, and it’s at this stage that the green bean itself is now finally visible. It is then sorted, and whether by hand or mechanically, the coffee will be graded according to size, density and colour. Coffee sizes are measured in fractions of an inch, but commonly referred to as a single number: eg. 16/64 inch is simply a size 16. Particularly small beans may be rejected and sold at the local market.
Once sorted, samples will be taken and visually examined for defects, then roasted in a small ‘sample roaster’ to assess the quality of a finished cup. The mill will be looking for such things as evidence of coffee weevil activity, manifested by small boring holes in beans (see page 28).
The sheer quantity of small growers means that some exporters and buyers will sample roast, grind, brew and cup up to 1,000 samples of coffee a day. Some of these samples may be identified as being of especially high quality, and the goal of the exporter will be to separate these from the lower-quality samples that may be blended together for bulk sales. The best of these selections are made in to ‘lots’ destined for auction, which can vary in size from only a few pounds to many tons, depending on availability and price. Intended for the speciality market, lots may be categorized by variety, processing method, plots on the farm and even the day of harvest. Local auctions or those arranged by organizations such as ‘Cup of Excellence’ offer the chance for importers to connect the needs of roasters to the available product. It has become more common in the past 20 years to see roasters travel to auctions themselves to assess, cup and bid on lots in person.
When all is said and done, though, regardless of how good or bad the coffee is, someone will be willing to buy it, from chipped pieces of sorry old beans to the top tier of speciality coffee.
TRANSPORTATION
Green coffee has, in the past, always been transported In the familiar 70-kg/155-lb jute, hessian or burlap sacks and they continue to be the bag of choice for most exporters (and many a bean-bag manufacturer) as they are cheap, renewable and, practically speaking, easy to take samples from. The downside of jute is that it provides absolutely no protection from water, and as such, meets only the most fundamental requirements of a bag. Green coffee, while much hardier than roasted coffee, does age and deteriorate over time and the jute sack does little to prevent this.
In recent years, a couple of newer options have become popular with roasters that pay particular attention to the quality and freshness of their greens. One of the much-heralded alternatives is the vacuum sack, which effectively removes all of the air from around the product and protects it against moisture and exterior odours. The removal of oxygen slows the ageing of the beans until such a time that the bag is opened and the coffee roasted.
There are other plastic options that have made an appearance recently, too, such as the products created by US company GrainPro Inc., which offer some of the benefits of vacuum packing, but without the need for specialist equipment.
Germany is one of the world’s biggest importers of coffee, as is evident from this new arrival at Hamburg’s docks.
DECAFFEINATION
I must confess to being something of a caffeine evangelist, and those that have dared to order decaffeinated coffee from me in the past have often received it garnished with a smile of questionable sincerity. It is perhaps a little unfair of me to have acted that way, but besides those choosing to avoid caffeine before bedtime, I have never found a good reason why anyone should choose to sacrifice the quality of their coffee by choosing to drink it decaf.
Truthfully, though, decaffeinated doesn’t have to mean bad. It’s just a fact of life that it generally is. Most baristas apply less care and attention to making decaffeinated espresso, and certainly most roasters consider its processing and packaging an afterthought. Indeed, the green coffee destined for decaffeination is, unsurprisingly, not normally of the highest standard, a fact that is later compensated for with a dark roast.
Better-quality decaffeinated coffee is becoming more available, however, made from fresh, good-quality green beans and roasted in the correct manner, and in these rare examples we find that flavour has not been compromised at all. Confirmation of this can now be found in top cafés, where we are also starting to see dedicated decaffeinated grinders alongside a regular espresso blend.
THE PROcESS
These days, decaffeination is still conducted before the coffee is roasted and generally removes 90–95 per cent of the caffeine from the product. Priority number one is to remove as much caffeine as possible from the coffee, while priority number two is to leave behind components of the bean that are necessary for flavour development during roasting.
Today, the most sinister method of decaffeination is the solvents process, which has been used in one form or another since the early 20th century. These days, it involves either ethyl acetate (responsible for the pear-drop confectionery aroma present in nail varnish remover and glue) or dichloromethane (a type of paint stripper that is also used as a flavour extractive medium) to rinse the caffeine out of steamed green beans. It takes around 10 hours, then the coffee is steamed again to remove any trace of the solvents. This method of decaffeination is a very efficient process – so efficient in fact that a great deal of bean character can be stripped away, too.
This Kafee HAG advert from 1937 promises consumers a good night’s sleep after a cup of their decaffeinated coffee.
The Swiss Water Process is a little more gentle, and involves first soaking the beans in water to open up their cell structure. The beans are then washed with a water-based liquid that also contains a concentrated extract of green coffee – the theory being that any positive attributes that are removed by the water are immediately replenished by the extract. The liquid is then charcoal-filtered to remove the caffeine, and subsequently recycled back around the coffee beans, sometimes multiple times.
Finally, there’s the CO2 (carbon dioxide) process, also known as Supercritical Fluid Extraction (sounds exciting, no?). Like the other methods, the coffee beans are first steamed or soaked in water to make them more porous. Following soaking or steaming, the coffee is soaked, under very high pressure, in liquid CO2. At this stage, the CO2 is in a supercritical state, meaning that its temperature states it should be a gas, but its pressure forces it to behave somewhere in between a gas and a liquid. The caffeine dissolves into the CO2 over a few hours, then the pressure in the system is reduced, allowing the CO2 to evaporate, stripping the caffeine away in the process.
On a final note, in 2008, a naturally caffeine-free species of coffee, Coffea charrieriana, was discovered in Cameroon, which could be a huge development.
INSTANT COFFEE
Contrary to what you might think, instant coffee is made from real coffee. Granted, it generally tastes nothing like the real thing
, but once upon a time, like any other coffee drink, it was a seed on a green tree. It’s the arduous inorganic process that instant coffee undergoes that strips away any hint of nuance that may or may not have once existed in what was most likely a poor and wretched coffee bean. A brewed cup of coffee is a delicate thing; its complex aromatics are fleeting, and its merits remain for only the briefest of moments. Once left to sit and wallow, a coffee loses much of its nuances, aromatics become muddy, generic and just plain clumsy.
The advantages of instant coffee are undeniable, though. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to live in a world where coffee could be prepared by simply pouring hot water over coffee-flavoured granules only to be rewarded with a balanced, full-bodied and fruity cup? The coffee would always be consistent, foolproof to prepare, easy to adjust according to strength preferences and it would never go stale – not to mention the fact that it would take up much less space in the kitchen.
Instant coffee is manufactured from real coffee beans, but don’t expect it to taste the same!
That, no doubt, was the plan when David Strang launched Strang’s Coffee, the first soluble coffee granule back in 1890. Strang used a ‘Dry Hot-Air’ method to evaporate the moisture out of brewed coffee, leaving behind a crusty coffee residue that could be broken up into mostly soluble nuggets. Who knows what it tasted like – there’s a good chance it was terrible – but the idea was ingenious and it prompted other companies to seek new, convenient ways to brew coffee in the home.
One such product was George Constant Washington’s ‘Red E Coffee’ (see what he did there?), which launched in 1910 and dominated the market until the arrival of Nescafé. Perhaps the biggest name in instant coffee, Nescafé, was launched in 1938 after the Brazilian government approached the Nestlé food company, seeking a solution for its huge surplus of coffee beans. The product itself was a combination of sugar and dried coffee residue, and was an immediate success, thanks largely to World War II, as it became a hit with the military for its longevity and convenience. After the war, it became a staple product in kitchen cupboards around the world. At the height of its popularity in the 1970s, over one-third of all the coffee imported into the USA was being turned into instant.
After World War II, high-vacuum freeze-drying was introduced, which meant that the coffee could be dried at a lower temperature, more quickly, meaning the flavour was better preserved. This technology, along with spray drying, is how instant coffee is made today.
In all methods the coffee is first roasted and ground. Next water is pumped through a series of 5–7 huge percolation columns. Each column contains coffee at varying stages of extraction, and as the water passes from the freshest through to the oldest, the temperature decreases, ensuring that nothing is left behind. Basically it’s the most efficient (and impassive) method of extracting flavour from ground coffee that modern industry has allowed us. So far, so apathetic. Next the extract is concentrated to around 40 per cent solids. This can be done in a couple of ways, the easiest and most damaging of which is simple heating and evaporation. Another option is to put the coffee in a massive centrifuge which, like a spin dryer, will separate the heavy (flavoursome) components from the light (watery) bits. The final option is the technique of partially freezing the solution, causing ice (water) crystals to form, which can be mechanically separated from the gooey coffee mush. While these heinous acts are committed, the airspace around the coffee is flushed with nitrogen and/or carbon dioxide, which preserves some of the aroma of the coffee by eliminating oxygen from the system. Next the concentrate is either spray-dried, or freeze-dried.
Spray-drying entails moving a superfine mist of coffee concentrate through a column of hot air – think hairspray and hair dryer. The mist is so fine that the tiny coffee particles dry into big piles of brown flour. The ‘flour’ is then tumbled through the air with a fine mist of steam, which wets the surface of the dry coffee causing the dust particles to adhere together and form the little nuggets that we are familiar with.
Freeze-drying is slightly more sympathetic to the coffee. The concentrate is cooled down to -40°C/-40°F usually very rapidly (in the region of 1–2 minutes). The very low temperature means that the coffee concentrate is below its triple point – the lowest temperature possible for solid and liquid concentrate phases to co-exist. This is important because the next stage aims to remove the frozen water from the concentrate by sublimation: i.e. turning it into vapour, rather than melting. This is achieved by dramatically lowering the air pressure inside the freeze-dryer and simultaneously increasing the temperature. It is done over different stages, but the aim is simple: get rid of the water and leave behind only moon-rock-esque coffee.
The dried coffee will still contain around one per cent moisture, but compared to most earthly objects that is very low indeed, and the cause for its fragile and brittle nature. It’s this low water content that also gives instant coffee one of its greatest strengths: preservation. But it also means it must be stored in a sealed container to prevent it from sucking water out of the air like a sponge.
It’s not clear whether it is the technology used to manufacture instant coffee, or the quality of the coffee in the first place, which is responsible for the insipid instants that we know and recognize. My own experiences with freeze-dryers leads me to think that there is perhaps a future for genuinely great instant coffee.
Right now, though, the speciality coffee movement and the supermarket shelf are at odds with each other. The instant coffee consumer will see little value in an instant costing five times the price of the industry standard, and the gourmets themselves will not lower to the romantically vacuous realms of instant – even if it did taste any good.
Convenience, evocative marketing and blind ignorance to the quality of flavour helped to build a market for soluble coffee.
COFFEE AS A COMMODITY
Since the 1940s, there have been ongoing arrangements between producing countries (many of which rely on coffee as the chief export) and consuming countries that have aimed to stabilize production quotas to limit overproduction and the economy-shattering price drops they can cause. The Inter-American Coffee Agreement, first signed in 1940 and the International Coffee Agreement (ICA) of 1962, like so much of coffee’s history, have their roots in politics, born out of the concern that Latin-American countries may be tempted into extreme left or right wing political tendencies if their export values weren’t guaranteed. Today, the ICA is managed by the International Coffee Organization (ICO) and now includes members from 42 producing countries, equating to about 97 per cent of all the coffee grown in the world, according to the ICO website. The agreement is only really relevant to the commodities market, where coffee is purchased at the lowest-possible price, destined for a jar of instant or a pack of some stepped-on, pre-ground, black crumbs. In effect, the agreement means that each producing country has a production quota, and when the price per pound falls, the quota is reduced and the price, in theory, goes up.
Of course the commodity price for a pound of coffee still fluctuates, so there is a kind of baseline price that everyone works from, often referred to as the ‘C-price’, that acts as global indicator of the price of commodity coffee. The C-price actually only refers to the price of coffee on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), so it isn’t indicative of the price being paid everywhere (since only a small percentage of coffee passes through NYSE), but it does act as a reference point for other markets. Subject to the countless variables that can affect any high-volume product, the ‘C’ is prone to shift considerably, and in the past five years alone, it has dropped to barely more than $1/65 pence per pound in late 2013, and peaked at a massive $3/£1.90 per pound in 2011. Since the C-price is not reflective of the cost of production of a pound of coffee, this has meant that sometimes producers find themselves losing money.
FAIR TRADE, ORGANIC AND RAINFOREST ALLIANCE
Up until the later part of the 20th century, the stark reality of poverty, exploitation, violence and political corruption
that the coffee industry has aggravated, in many countries over the years had been quite well covered up. The ICA, which was renegotiated every five years, expired in 1989 after failing to agree on new export quotas, and parties failed to establish new terms quickly enough. What ensued was a ‘coffee crisis’ that saw the supply of coffee vastly outweigh the demand. This drove down the price of coffee to only $0.77/50 pence per pound as the market became saturated, which spelled bad news for millions of farmers across the world. The Fair Trade Certification, under its original name, ‘Max Havelaar’– the hero of a 19th-century Dutch novel that critiques the practices of the Dutch East India Company in Java – was launched in the Netherlands, and aimed to standardize pricing, no matter what the availability of coffee at the time. Now known by the more familiar name ‘Fair Trade’, the price per pound of green coffee is set at $1.40/90 pence, or $0.05 (0.03 pence) above the C-price (whichever is greater).
Coffee is the chief export of over a dozen developing countries; in Uganda it makes up 15 per cent of the country’s total output.
On the whole, Fair Trade has to be a good thing if, as it claims, it is giving more money to coffee producers. The critics of Fair Trade will argue that there is insufficient transparency in the process, traceability is poor (only co-operatives can enrol in the program) and that the simple freezing or tracking of prices does little to encourage farmers to improve the quality of their coffee.
The other two official certifications of note are Organic and Rainforest Alliance. The former, as with any other product or foodstuff, simply indicates that the farming practices that have been used to produce the product are in-line with organic standards, promoting good soil health and sustainability of farmland. An organic certification has no bearing on quality, though. A Rainforest Alliance certification is often (but not always) partnered with an organic certification, as it goes a step further, requiring certain agricultural practices that promote sustainability, safeguarding of the environment, as well as welfare standards for producing families and their communities.
The Curious Barista's Guide to Coffee Page 5