Explaining the Popularity of Coffee
Explaining the Popularity of Coffee
For many people coffee is just a drink that acts as an alternative to tea or soda pop. For others, coffee is necessary for survival to help them stay awake during long meetings, and for some, coffee is an art that requires much planning and high efforts are made to maintain it’s best quality. In any case, coffee must travel through a complicated process before it reaches one’s cup.
Coffee beans come from a tropical evergreen shrub, which grow as high as 100 feet, although it is usually kept much shorter so that it can be maintained. The leaves look very similar to the leaves of a laurel bush, and the blossoms smell like jasmine. The average tree produces 1-1.5 pounds of roasted coffee per year. Coffee beans are in all actuality a seed that are contained in a bright red plump cherry. The coffee cherry has a thin skin, with a bitter flavor, and the inner portion is similar to a grape in texture and is quite sweet. A parchment, which is a slimy layer of mucilage, protects the bean. The coffee bean is a bluish color and is coated in a thin layer called a silver skin. It takes around five years for a tree to bear a full crop of coffee cherries and will then continue to produce for 15 years. The three major types of trees are the Robusta, Aribic, and the Liberica. The Rubusta grows in lower elevations, has a harsh flavor, and contains around 2% caffeine. This is a lower grade of coffee, and is used in instant coffee and commercial coffee. The Arabic coffee flourishes in 3-6.5 thousand feet altitude. They contain about 1% caffeine in weight. Because of the slower process is only yields about 1-1.5 pounds of coffee per year, but the quality is much improved. Arabic coffee is 75% of the coffee in production today. The last tree, Liberica, is a minor crop in Africa that is similar to Rubusta (Clark 1-3).
Sand is the ideal soil in which coffee should grow. Coffee shrubs must be kept watered; most of the water supply for the plants comes from irrigated wells. The wells are drilled 250-300 meters with a pump that is placed 60 meters into...