How Coffee Travels From Plantations to Espresso Machines Articles | Coffee

The most amazing fact about the coffee beans is the trees having an expansion over 70 countries, from Brazil to Indonesia, still requiring a narrow range of conditions to produce those quality 'beans', while the total output remains small at large.

'Beans' as it is said so, is however a deliberate attempt to mark it in a single-quote, for the thing that gets ground and roasted to brew up the delicious drink is a seed and not a bean at all.

The coffee tree, which can easily grow up to twenty feet or more than that, bears the fruits that contain the coffee seeds. However some wild varieties of coffee trees can grow to over 15m or 45 feet. Most of the seeds are in pairs except for the Peaberry, which produces only one. It's quite like a cranberry, at the outer there is a membrane called silverskin with a sweet pulp inside it.

The overwhelming majority of the world's coffee output comes from a sphere around the equator that extends to approximately 25 degrees north or south. A temperature between 60F and 70F and with a rainfall of 6" per month or a little more than that, are ideal for the cultivation of coffee seeds.

For quality stuff, the soil should have good draining, loamy with plenty of mist and high humidity and the cloud should be at the high altitudes of over 915m. Here, the trees take a longer time to mature, as the oxygen content is lower at these elevations.

The majority of the coffee includes the species coffea canephora or the robusta, for it has a higher resistance against diseases and can be grown at lower altitudes. However it's the high elevation coffea arabica that actually lives up to the taster's choice.

After planting, the tree takes about five years to mature to yield and a single tree can amply make about two pounds (1 kilogram) of coffee seeds.

Laborers are usually used to handpick those two pounds of coffee that can equal about 2,000 beans (as per the standard term). Well, it may sound manual, but the coffee bean harvesting requires a lot of skills that can be only developed over time. So, the picker learns to be adept enough to go through individual bean and discard the bad beans and select the good ones. This certainly explains why coffee is so dear at cost.

Coffee trees have dark green, broad leaves and bear Jasmine like flowers. The flowers take a six to eight week period to blossom in somewhere like Brazil or Mexico. In some countries like Columbia and Kenya that are located by the equator, a tree can have the mature flowers and still have ripened berries simultaneously, thus making the picking process so special.

Where conditions are not favorable, the coffee berries are taken down from those regions and processed to supply the demand of the second largest commodity in the world (volume estimated by annual dollar).