Coffee for One

by KJ Fallon

  In any case, there was some skepticism whether flavored coffees would attract the soft-drink devotee. But flavored coffees, along with flavored creamers, are here to stay. For example, consumers can buy Starbucks K-Cups with natural flavors such as vanilla and caramel.

  Another factor in the success and increasing customer base for specialty coffee is the ability to control certain features. For sure, there was no controlling the climate where the coffee was grown, what type of coffee the grower would be cultivating (i.e., arabica or robusta), or the place—Brazil, or Colombia, and Kona, or etc.—but roasters and specialty coffee shop owners could multiply their selections by using a bit of imagination. At the roasting and beyond stage, there were many ways to market and sell the coffee to the specialty coffee shops and, in turn, for the shops to sell to their customers. At the roasting level, the roaster might blend different beans from different areas and produce a blend that could vary from day to day.

  Manés Alves is the founder of Coffee Lab International (CLI), an independent coffee testing facility in Vermont that has catered to all segments of the coffee industry since 1995—from small coffee farmers, exporters, importers, micro-roasters, and large commercial roasters, to multinational retailers, restaurant chains, cafés, and food service providers.

  Manés Alves is on the Technical Standards Committee of the Specialty Coffee Association. The Technical Standards Committee is one of the longest continuously functioning volunteer committees within the SCA. They conduct research to determine specialty coffee standards and ascertain industry best practice for publication on behalf of the Specialty Coffee Association. The SCA not only works for their members, but also the coffee industry overall.

  Alves has some ideas about why specialty coffee became so very popular. One reason is that, starting in 2000, the Specialty Coffee Association started to educate the people in the industry.28 “Up to that point, we never educated anybody,” he said in an interview. “Since 2000 we came up with different programs. We, meaning the Specialty Coffee Association, that it’s done through them or it’s done through something like the Coffee Quality Institute, which is part of the Specialty Coffee Association.” (The Coffee Quality Institute is a nonprofit organization that works on a global level to improve the quality of coffee and the lives of those who produce coffee.)

  Alves said that the SCA has had programs before, since 1995 or earlier, but the programs consisted of classes that were offered once a year. The classes were about things like brewing the coffee, and were referred to as “coffee conferences.” There were limited vacancies for these classes, with the largest class having maybe about 150 people. “They would fill up pretty quickly,” he said, “and that would be a problem. Since then we came up with many programs, and we started to implement all these for roasting, cupping, brewing.” Not only is there a barista program, there are coffee bean sales programs that provide an opportunity for people to learn very concrete issues having to do with every aspect of coffee.

  In addition to what the SCA has done, a couple of universities have been showing interest in developing coffee-related programs and the resources around it. As of now, one program is specifically designed around coffee processing in Lábrea in Brazil. According to Alves, they are still in the process of launching the program, and that once ready, it will take between one and two years to complete.

  Since the program has to do with harvest, those taking this course have to go to the source and do some work. “We cannot just do the program online or something like that,” said Alves. “You have to go out and actually do it.”

  Academic institutions have started to take notice of the meteoric rise of specialty coffee, so they have started offering another way for people seriously interested in the coffee process to learn firsthand from the experts. The Coffee Center at UC Davis in California is not a place to grab a cup of coffee.29 The Coffee Center is a place where students who want to know more about the coffee process can learn by taking part in a hands-on approach in a newly designed location that includes the Peet’s Coffee Pilot Roastery, thanks to a donation in 2016 from Peet’s Coffee. A couple of years prior, the university had taken notice that there was a growing interest in coffee among students—“The Design of Coffee,” was voted the most popular course on campus—and started the “Coffee Initiative.”

  There are many learning tools for the study of coffee as a science that did not exist before. In the end, everyone with any interest in coffee benefits, from the growers to the consumer.

  While the proliferation of specialty coffee was one of the factors that paved the way for the single-serve option, other events laid the groundwork for single serve.

  To understand that evolution, we must take a fast walk through the coffee history chamber. A very fast walk.

  CHAPTER 2

  A Sixty-Second Take on the Sometimes-Subversive Journey of Coffee through History

  The word coffee is like a charm. It conjures up all sorts of aromas, tastes, expectations, and memories. The heat that permeates your fingers as they embrace a warm ceramic (or porcelain or stoneware or ironstone) cup as you take that first sip. The remembrance of things caffeinated. Coffee, the beverage, emanates from coffee, the plant.

  Coffee is in the family Rubiaceae, which also includes the species of plants or trees that give us quinine and ipecac. Coffee is known by many names to different people: café (French and Spanish), kaffee (Germans), caffe (Italians), kahvi (Finnish), koffie (Dutch), kafes (Greeks), and kaffa (Guragigna in Southwest Ethiopia, where coffee originated). There are as many legends as there is history about the journey of coffee from Ethiopia (then Abyssinia) sometime around the first century, to the mass-generated coffee in cans to specialty coffee to the single serve. According to ethiopianspecialtycoffee.com, coffea arabica has been growing wild in Africa since “time immemorial.”1

  Coffee’s Provocative Path from Discovery to Obsession

  The legend that is closely bound with the origins of coffee as a drink features a goat herder by the name of Kalid and takes place in the Ethiopian province of Kaffa. Kalid saw that the goats he was tending to were exceptionally energetic after eating the cherry-like fruit on some of the bushes. Kalid tried the berries as well and found them to be very stimulating. Enter a monk who came upon Kalid while in a highly energetic state. The monk decided to try the berries himself. Evidently, the monk liked how he felt because he gathered up some of the coffee cherries and planted the seeds near his monastery. Eventually, he harvested cherries from the plant and tried boiling them. The other monks drank the liquid and found that they had no trouble avoiding nodding off during the nighttime prayers.

  Sometimes Misunderstood, Often Sought After, and Always Prized

  Another version of this story holds that the goat herder tried the cherries when he saw that his goats were unusually lively after eating the red fruit, and he felt so euphoric that he ran home to his wife with the cherries. She suggested that her husband take them to the nearby monastery since the fruit had to be blessed in some way. The goat herder did just that and gave the cherries to the monk in charge after telling him about the wonderful powers of the berry. The head monk was not impressed. Saying that they were the work of the Devil, he threw the cherries into a fire. You can imagine what the result was. The cherries began roasting. It wasn’t long before the fragrant—almost invigorating—smell of the roasting beans permeated the air. The other monks became curious and, as this version of the legend goes, the roasted beans were removed from the fireplace and broken up to thoroughly put out the cinders. Somehow, for some reason, a monk (the head monk, one must presume) dictated that the crushed beans, which now were reduced to grains, were to be placed in a large jug that was then filled with hot water. Was this the first pot of coffee? Possibly, because that night the monks drank some of the beverage and found they had no trouble staying alert throughout the night during their lengthy prayers.2

  Still another legend says that the monks could have simply been chewing t
he berries for its rousing properties for centuries. For some reason, at some point, one of the monks decided to make a beverage from the fruit.

  It seems there is no shortage of stories and legends when it comes to the discovery of coffee, for yet another version says that it was Sudanese slaves who chewed on the cherries, the fruits that surrounds the beans, to help them endure the journey from Ethiopia to Arabia. Coffee may also have been crushed with clarified butter and eaten like a sweet, something that is still done in Kaffa and Sidamo in Ethiopia.

  Another legend says that Sheikh Omar saw some coffee plants growing uncultivated in the region of Mocha in Yemen. He picked some of the coffee cherries and placed them in boiling water, creating an invigorating beverage. This legend has many variations, including one in which Sheikh Omar presented the coffee beverage to the King of Mocha to give to his ailing daughter. Still another variation on this particular coffee theme says an enchanting bird flew to Sheikh Omar and brought him to a coffee tree laden with coffee cherries.3

  In any case, coffee, in the initial forms it was known, was long recognized as something that benefited whoever chewed the berries or drank the beverage made from them. It stimulated the senses and sharpened the mind. If you needed to stay alert and awake, here was a solution. And it was right there growing on some bushes.

  Once coffee made it to the Arabian Peninsula, the world would be next. According to the National Coffee Association USA (NCA), “By the 15th century, coffee was being grown in the Yemeni district of Arabia and by the 16th century it was known in Persia, Egypt, Syria, and Turkey.”4 Something was changing with coffee and the drinking of this lively, caffeinated beverage. People were not just having it in their house, they were gathering in coffeehouses that were open to the public. These were very social and popular places where people, in addition to drinking coffee, could take part in conversations, find out what was going on around them, and hear music. Says the NCA, “Coffee houses quickly became such an important center for the exchange of information that they were often referred to as ‘Schools of the Wise.’”5

  Coffee continued its journey East to what was then Ceylon, and by the early sixteenth century to Constantinople, where coffeehouses sprang up midcentury. Here, too, coffee was seen as a very provocative beverage and the coffeehouses were looked at with suspicion. Coffee and coffeehouses were again associated with intellectual thought and new ideas, where much debate and discussion took place. This was seen as potentially threatening and over the years both the drink and the popular establishments where coffee was consumed were banned. It was true that these gathering places could be a comfortable place where dissidents and freethinkers might associate with one another, and so their very existence might threaten the powers that be at the time, religious or secular. Even the beverage seemed to be held in either high esteem or as the source of evil: “From time to time coffee continued to be banned, the target of religious zealots, and at one time second offenders were sewn into leather bags and thrown into the Bosphorus. But coffee was profitable and finally achieved respectability when it became subject to tax.”6

  Ah yes, taxing coffee seemed to make a lot of difference in its acceptability.

  By the mid-seventeenth century, coffee found its way to Europe, thanks to Venetian traders. Once again, coffee was the center of a controversy: “. . . some clerics, like the mullahs of Mecca, suggested it should be excommunicated as it was the Devil’s work. However, Pope Clement VIII (1592–1605) enjoyed it so much that he declared that coffee should be baptized to make it a true Christian drink.”7

  In 1683, Venice opened its first coffeehouse, the Caffé Florian, and it is still doing business today.8 The coming decades and century saw many coffeehouses opening throughout Europe. Here were comfortable spaces where people could gather to enjoy an enlivening cup of coffee and lively conversation. The coffeehouse concept was here to stay.

  Oxford was the location of the first coffeehouse in England, which makes sense considering the educational facilities there. A couple of years later London had a coffeehouse or two, including Edward Lloyd’s coffeehouse on Tower Street. Lloyd’s coffeehouse was the beginning of Lloyd’s of London, the 325-year-old institution that is widely known for its specialist insurance. Back in 1688, Edward Lloyd’s coffeehouse was the place to go for marine insurance. London was a center for trade and there was a lot of demand for insurance for the sailing vessels that would be bringing in and taking out goods and supplies. According to Lloyd’s website:

  Lloyd’s was by now established at 16 Lombard Street, in the very centre of the business world, and was emerging as the location for marine underwriting by individuals. The American Revolution of the 1770s, followed by the Napoleonic Wars in the early 1800s, would soon demonstrate just how vital marine insurance could be. It would bring large profits to those who could provide it—but it also brought huge losses. During this period, Lloyd’s began to dominate shipping insurance on a global scale.9

  And it all began in a coffee shop.

  According to the NCA:

  Coffee houses were quickly becoming centers of social activity and communication in the major cities of England, Austria, France, Germany and Holland. In England “penny universities” sprang up, so called because for the price of a penny one could purchase a cup of coffee and engage in stimulating conversation. Coffee began to replace the common breakfast drink beverages of the time—beer and wine. Those who drank coffee instead of alcohol began the day alert and energized, and not surprisingly, the quality of their work was greatly improved.10

  Coffee made it to the New World, to what was then New Amsterdam, when it was settled by the Dutch. There were a good number of coffeehouses, but tea was still the favorite drink of the colonists in the New World. That is, tea was the preferred drink until King George III of England decided to levy a high tax on tea in the colonies. That tax and the revolt that followed, the Boston Tea Party, forever pushed out tea in favor of coffee as the American drink of choice. Thomas Jefferson declared coffee to be “the favorite drink of the civilized world.”11

  This is how the consuming of coffee evolved, but what about the cultivation of the coffee plant, so the beverage could be harvested in a dependable manner? Coffee growing was becoming highly prized and there was a lot of competition among coffee plantations. Convenient for the countries in Europe, they had quite a few colonies that offered a suitable climate for growing Coffea arabica. The Dutch, for example, had Sri Lanka and Surinam. Coffee was then planted in South America, the future hub for coffee growing, and Africa in British East Africa (Kenya), in the late nineteenth century, not far from where it all began in Ethiopia, which is a very big coffee bean exporter today.

  In 1714, Amsterdam’s mayor gave French King Louis XIV a fledgling coffee plant, which the king had planted in Paris’s Royal Botanical Garden, according to the NCA. Almost ten years later a naval officer, Gabriel de Clieu, procured a cutting from the royal coffee plant: “Despite a challenging voyage—complete with horrendous weather, a saboteur who tried to destroy the seedling, and a pirate attack—he managed to transport it safely to Martinique. Once planted, the seedling not only thrived, but it’s credited with the spread of over 18 million coffee trees on the island of Martinique in the next 50 years. Even more incredible is that this seedling was the parent of all coffee trees throughout the Caribbean, South and Central America.”12

  Seduction may have played a part in how coffee found its way to Brazil. There are different versions of the story (of course) but the gist is that Francisco de Mello Palheta, an officer who was sent to Cayenne, French Guiana, to settle some sort of political or land dispute (or he was sent there to get coffee plant seedlings) ended up absconding with coffee plants, even though they were heavily guarded. But the armaments of the guards were no match for his charm. The governor’s wife, entranced by his charisma, gave Francisco a bouquet in which coffee plant seeds had been carefully hidden. From these seeds grew the coffee industry that makes Brazil undisputedly the la
rgest coffee producing country in the world.13 By the way, the second largest coffee-producing country? Vietnam.14

  Over the following decades, coffee seeds were dispersed through the travels of traders, missionaries, and others who regularly went from one land to another. As the NCA says, “Plantations were established in magnificent tropical forests and on rugged mountain highlands. Some crops flourished, while others were short-lived. New nations were established on coffee economies. Fortunes were made and lost. By the end of the 18th century, coffee had become one of the world’s most profitable export crops. After crude oil, coffee is the most sought commodity in the world.”15

  There you have a very abbreviated version of how coffee found its way around the world. But, what about how it gets from where it grows to your mug?

  CHAPTER 3

  The Journey from Tree to Table

  While coffee’s journey from where it is grown to the coffee drinker’s cup may not be as perilous or fraught with danger as the journey centuries ago from its discovery to worldwide enjoyment, there are still many steps from coffee tree to your brewer. Ten steps, to be exact, according to the National Coffee Association USA (NCA).1

  Everything starts, as it so often does, with a seed. Coffee beans are the seeds of the coffee plant. These are the same beans that are dried, roasted, and ground to make the perfect brew of coffee. Without all of this processing, the bean stays a seed that can be planted to grow more coffee plants. Young coffee plants need just the right amount of sun, shade, moisture, and fertilizer to produce an abundant crop.