Coffee was birthed in the Ethiopian highlands. The legend goes that 9th-century goatherder Kaldi noticed how “spirited” his goats became after eating berries from a certain tree, so he ran to the local monastery to let those guys know. A monk created a brew from the berries and was able to stay up much later praying.
Eventually, news of this new brew spread into Egypt and into the Arabian peninsula, where coffee traveled east and west, finally landing in southeast Asia and the Americas. And it’s been popular ever since.
How it’s made
Coffee trees blossom with white flowers in the spring, which give way to small green beans (technically they’re seeds). They ripen into a full-blown “cherry” by fall, where they are then picked by hand.
Coffee beans ripen at different rates, so one tree could have a mix of green (not yet ripe) and red (ripe) beans, which calls for experienced pickers to ultimately provide a less bitter drink. Often, cheaper coffee comes from a mix of green beans and red cherries, strip-picked at once mechanically.
Next, the age-old method is to dry the cherries in the sun until their moisture content is no more than 10 percent. They’re spread out on tables and raked frequently to prevent spoilage, and overall, this process could take up to several weeks. It’s still done in many places around the world.
A more modern-day method is to remove the cherry’s pulp mechanically and then dry it with only parchment skin on. This involves several days of work involving fermentation tanks and rotating drums.
Next, the cherries are hulled mechanically, which means the outer husk is fully removed, leaving a green bean waiting to be roasted. They are washed and then sorted by size, and often the process stops here, leaving others to roast their coffee.
Roasting turns the green bean into the dark coffee we know and can be light, medium, dark, or somewhere in between, depending on taste. The resulting final flavor can be anywhere from smoky to spicy to smooth to fruity, depending on where the beans were grown and its chosen roasting process.
