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.

Coffee is actually from the coffee plant which is a tropical evergreen which belongs to the genus "Coffea" under the family of "Rubiaceae." There are around 60 plants in this particular genus however there are but three being harvested commercially namely Arabica, Robusta and Libeca. Finding your coffee plant is all too easy - that is if you live in places like the Latin America, Asia and Africa. Your commercially produced coffee is being cultivated and grown between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. Hawaii is the sole place that grows coffee in the United States.

Why people use the term "coffee beans" is a fact bound to be uncovered when you see the fruit of the coffee plant consisting of two bean-looking seeds joined by pulp and skin when you break it open. It's not a bean, however, but a berry. There is much labor put into harvesting these coffee berries. As these berries ripen at different times and they don't become come ideal for picking until they ripen just right, they are mostly hand-picked. Even with the existence of mechanical pickers, hand-picking is still preferred by many because machines don't give as reliable and efficient results as people.

In extracting the coffee beans from the berry, one may use either of the two methods - dry processing or the wet method. The dry method as its name suggests calls for drying the berries under the sun which is rather lengthy because you will have to wait until it is hard and brown and that could mean several weeks of drying. The latter method requires soaking the berries in water for several days before letting them dry under the sun or in a drying machine if you have one. Most often, the dry method for processing is being opted over the wet method when extracting the beans because this is easier and 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.

Come to a Culver City coffee house if you are anywhere within the area of Los Angeles and want to enjoy the area's best cup of coffee. At Island Monarch Coffee, they use only the finest coffee beans imported from Hawaii and South America. For that freshness guarantee, they make sure that the coffee beans are roasted only after they are imported to Los Angeles and grind the beans just at the moment you place your order which could make any coffee drinker truly enjoy his cup. Through the process of reverse osmosis, the water they use is as completely purified as possible. This special water is used for all of the drinks at Island Monarch Coffee.




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