It's All About Coffee

For me, coffee has proved to be endlessly fascinating, engaging, and rewarding. Coffee is many different things for different people. This amazing drink is full of flavour, intrigue, history, and countless stories. With this dictionary, I am excited to explore and discover coffee with you. For a lot of people, a cup of coffee need only be something of passable quality and sufficient heat that delivers the expected caffeine kick. The daily grind of life becomes a more evenly matched contest when there’s a mug of coffee at your side or a paper cup of it in your hand. I can’t deny that I’ve enjoyed the energizing effects of caffeine, and it’s certainly questionable whether this book would have been completed without it!We are now seeing a new wave of qualityfocused coffee shops that aim to pique our curiosity and satisfy our desire for a delicious drink, and, for a growing number of people, a good coffee is becoming much more than a simple agent of stimulation.

History of coffee

Our journey begins in Ethiopia. While it is generally accepted that Ethiopia is the birthplace of coffee, it’s quite likely that it was simply the first place that the crop truly flourished after spreading from the Sudan. Exactly when its leaves, cherries, or beans were first consumed is a mystery, though.

Coffee farming is an alchemy of available varieties, knowledge, traditions, technical practices such as pruning, fertilization and pest management, and environmental conditions including soil, topography, altitude, climate, and shade intensity. All the farmers aim to minimize costs and labor and maximize production. With coffee consumers increasingly demanding better aroma and taste, growing high-quality coffee is a key to economic success.

Species of coffee

All coffee trees belong to the Rubiaceae family of flowering plants, and more specifically, the Coffea genus, which currently encompasses over 120 individual species of plant, ranging from small shrubs to 18-m/60-ft high trees. Today coffee remains one of the most important trade products for many tropical countries, accounting for an important part of their agricultural exports. Nowadays, only two Coffea species are used on large scale as commercial products: Coffea arabica, also known as “Arabica,” and Coffea canephora, which produces the “Robusta” coffee.

Human love with coffee

The fact is that humans and coffee have traveled together. People all over the world celebrated the pleasures of the drink during the Age of Enlightenment and through many cultural mini-epochs. Writing about coffee has continued over time, and today there is a goldmine of scientific and professional information available from geneticists, agronomists, chemists, engineers, sensory scientists, historians, health professionals, and various other disciplines. Scientific papers are abundant covering every step of the value chain.

Coffee professionals write training materials, instructions, guidelines, and blogs equally providing information for other professionals in coffee.

Coffee beans to cup

• Quality, in the accepted sense of the term, takes into account the physical, chemical, and organoleptic properties of the coffee beverage. Among the overall components of quality, the genetic potential of the species, genotypes, and varieties to produce “quality beans” remains one of the most important.

• This is true not only in terms of size but also for the content of compounds (i.e., biochemical composition). Positive quality attributes such as acidity, fruity character, and other specific flavors are correlated with air temperature and Arabica coffees are typically produced under cool climates.

• Coffee brewing can range from fully automated to completely manual. There is a correlation in that higher-quality cups of coffee tend to be made more manually, though this is continuously being challenged. Often, automated machines are made with the goal of ease of use, potentially at the expense of cup quality, as they cannot be adapted to the specific needs of different coffees.

• The bloom is a term used to describe the rapid release of carbon dioxide (CO₂) that occurs when water hits ground coffee. It is that frothy, crust-like top you find on the top of a French press before you plunge down.

• The specific context in which we refer to this as a “bloom” rather than a “crust” is when brewing single-serve filter coffees. Often, the bloom will be singled out as a specific part of the pouring process. Brew recipes will indicate how much water to add at the beginning to “bloom” the coffee.

Multisensory Experience

1. Sense of smell - smells of coffee plantation - fresh leaves, coffee grains, dried coffee, ground coffee, soil, fruit, etc.

2. Sense of touch - experiencing the texture, temperature, hardness and shape of coffee grains, leaves, various plants; dipping hands in soil, touching worms.

3. Exploring sound - identifying, recognising the sources of sound (birds, twigs and leaves rustling, plants, machinery)

4. Tasting coffee - identifying the taste (bitter, sweet, sour, etc.) In case your children are still too young to have a tiny sip of freshly brewed coffee (and not too hot of course), consider letting them have a lick a grain of coffee with their tongues for the sake of meaningful sensory experience (mind the choking hazard!)

Comparing kinds of smell, sound and taste of the things which have been part of the experience.

Coffee fun and development

I’m probably right to say that you cannot resist the captivating smell of freshly ground coffee. It comes with the feeling of deep relaxation even if you are not a regular coffee drinker. And there is something particular about it - the smell alone is a unique experience. It can take you anywhere you want, and no matter where you go it is pure joy. This is the beauty of this truly amazing plant. As an agricultural crop, coffee is naturally subject to weather conditions and diseases. However, over the years coffee farmers have also had to deal with social unrest, varying market prices, demand for sustainably grown coffee, climate change, and other factors. This has led to various nongovernmental and nonprofit organizations as well as governments and the private sector to focus on farmers, and coffee itself has become a global laboratory for testing models of equitable and sustainable rural development. However, this is not the full story. When great quality is achieved, curious scientists will aim to understand how it was accomplished. And we should not forget that coffee is like a sacred elixir in a cup, bringing people together and fostering communications. Whether at home, the workplace, or a café, we congregate over coffee to chat, pontificate, loiter, and connect with each other.

Coffee breeding

• The coffee sector is facing strong challenges such as the negative effects of climatic changes on coffee production and quality. Therefore, the development of varieties of Arabica coffee better adapted to higher temperatures must be the priority for coffee breeders in the coming decades.

• On the other hand, the world market is also demanding higher volumes of quality coffees, pushing the producing countries to develop a new generation of varieties, showing modification to better adaptability, more consistent productivity, and more stable quality profiles.

• Robusta varieties have been obtained either by massal selection inside quite narrow genetic groups or by hybridization between genotypes selected in the Guinean and the Congolese groups. Results of these breeding strategies resulted in the significant improvement of yield and vigor, demonstrating the efficiency of the approaches.

• Breeding programs will need more assistance of new tools derived from DNA-based technologies. Today, the development of hybrids in different crop species makes it possible to engineer plants that produce high levels of metabolites without accruing a yield penalty.

Green coffee and fertilization

Green coffee quality and by consequence coffee sensory attributes are influenced by many factors in which environmental parameters and technical practices to cultivate coffee play a significant role. The benefit of shading trees on the production system and the coffee quality are discussed and compared with the potential drawbacks.

Fertilization is a key technique to increase and optimize the yield in the production system; it can also affect positively or negatively the quality of green coffee. There are many pests and diseases affecting the coffee trees and their effects on coffee quality are huge. For each topic, the objective is to keep the document accessible for nonspecialists and after a short description of the technical aspect concentrate on ways to enhance the coffee quality.

Cup coffee quality is primarily driven by the physical and chemical characteristics of green coffee, which is determined by the combination of three categories: Environmental factors × Genetic factors × Agricultural practices. All of them are important and also their interaction with each other.

Environmental Conditions for Coffee Growing

Climate change represents a major threat for coffee production in the world. According to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the average surface temperature has increased by 0.85°C from 1880 until now and, depending on the scenarios, would increase from another 1°C (optimistic) to 3.7°C (pessimistic) by 2100.

Climate change will also bring modifications in the geographical and temporal repartition of precipitations. Among all the climatic factors, the average air temperature during bean development strongly influences the sensory profile. Two volatile compounds (ethanal and acetone) were identified after roasting as biochemical markers of these cool temperatures on Arabica coffee.

Indian Monsooned Coffee

India launched the specialty coffee of “Monsooned” in the international market as early as 1972, even before the specialty movement gathered momentum in the world. The story of Monsooned coffee began in the mid-1800s, more than over a century before the word “specialty” was even coined for coffee.

Benefits of caffeine

• Caffeine (a type of alkaloid) is naturally present at a level of 1–2 per cent, plus there’s the lesser-known alkaloid, trigonelline, which makes up approximately 1 per cent of the bean’s dry weight. Trigonelline contributes a great deal of complex bitter notes to the coffee through the chemical effect of roasting, including niacin (vitamin B3).

• "Green’ or unroasted coffee beans, like most seeds, are compact stores of carbohydrates, proteins, acids and fats – basically everything the plant needs to grow and mature.

• Carbohydrates provide the energy that the bean would otherwise use, and makes up approximately 50 per cent of the total mass of the processed green bean.

• Approximately 10–20 per cent of that carbohydrate is sucrose, which will go on to provide sweetness, bittersweet caramels and even acidity later on when roasting.

• There’s a good store of fats and proteins, too, the latter of which will react with sugar during roasting (known as Maillard reactions) to create the familiar browned appearance and corresponding flavours that we know and love.

• "Finally, there’s a whole host of organic acids that give us both acidity and bitterness; most important among these is chlorogenic acid (CGA), which makes up around 8 per cent of the dry mass of a green bean.

Conclusion

Coffee has never been better, or more interesting, than it is today. Coffee producers have access to more varieties and techniques than ever before and we, as consumers, can share in that expertise to make sure the coffee we drink is the best we can find. Love to experience the flavours of coffee. The moderate and livelong intake of coffee/caffeine (the equivalent of 3-5 regular cups of caffeinated coffee) appears to be beneficial activities of or health. However, further research is needed before any firm conclusions can be drawn.