Thursday, December 5, 2013

The Truths About How Your Coffee Is Processed

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.

The tropical evergreen belonging to the genus "Coffea" which is part of the classification family of "Rubiaceae" is where your coffee comes from. About 60 plants under this genus have been discovered to exist but only three varieties are harvested commercially, including Robusta, Arabica and small amounts of Libeca. Maybe if you live in places like the tropic Latin America, Asia and Africa then you are familiar with the coffee plant. Coffee that is commercially produced can be found cultivated and grown between the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer only. In the United States, Hawaii is only state producing coffee.

When you try to break open the fruit of the coffee plant you will find two seeds looking like beans when separated that is covered by pulp and skin hence the common term used "coffee beans." The truth to the matter is that it isn't a bean, but the inside of a berry. The harvesting of these coffee berries can be very tedious. They don't ripen altogether at the same time which is why they are mostly picked by hand, harvested only when truly ripe. While there are mechanical picker machines many coffee plantation owners still prefer hand picking because these machines are not as efficient.

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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