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Some Coffee Facts for
you !!!!! There
are two types of coffee beans: Arabica and Robusta. Arabica beans are more flavorful and cost
more than Robusta beans. Sturbridge
Coffee Roasters ONLY use Arabica beans in our coffee blends. Robusta
beans have more caffeine and are cheaper than Arabica beans, but don’t taste
as good. Many roasting companies blend
Robusta and Arabica beans together to make cheaper coffee. Dark
roasted coffee actually has less caffeine than light or medium roasted coffee
since much of the caffeine is burned off during roasting. So, a 16 oz cup of medium roast coffee
might have about 400 milligrams of caffeine while a 16 oz cappuccino might
only have 40 milligrams of caffeine.
(Do you know what a milligram is?) Coffee
beans are grown all over the world, usually in areas near the Equator. Coffee takes on the flavor of the soil and
other plants that it grows near. For
instance: Guatemalan coffee may have an earthy taste of volcanic ash since
Guatemala has many volcanoes and Mexican coffee may have a cocoa taste since
it grows near so many cocoa plants. It
takes three years for a coffee plant to begin producing coffee beans. One coffee plant will produce enough coffee
beans to make 2 or 3 pounds of coffee per year. The coffee beans grow inside of a fruit
like skin called a “cherry.” And the
cherry is, well, red, like a cherry.
Each cherry must be picked by hand as they may grow in clusters and
some may be ripe while others need to wait on the plant to ripen more. It takes the farmers a lot of time to pick
their crop. The
cherries are washed and put in a big tank to ferment. Then the meat of the cherry is washed away
and fed to pigs and other farm animals that might live on the coffee grower’s
farm. The beans are now ready to
dry. They are spread out on large
cement slabs in the sun and constantly raked while the sun dries them. Raking prevents mold and mildew and insects
from attacking the beans. When the
beans are dried, they are called “green beans” (even though they’re pretty
gray in color). They are placed in
burlap bags and shipped all over the world.
The burlap bags weigh between 100 and 170 pounds. At
the Sturbridge Coffee Roasters, we roast our beans in a large roaster. Basically, the roaster is like a very hot
clothes dryer. The beans go into a
rotating barrel that cooks the beans at 400 to 500 degrees for about 15
minutes. During this cooking time, the
beans pop or “crack”. It’s like
popcorn popping, but the beans don’t explode, they just get bigger from the
pressure of a little bit of steaming sugar in the middle of the bean. Once
the beans are cooked or “roasted”.
They are cooled quickly. They
are left overnight to let any extra gases escape from the beans then they are
ground, bagged and brewed into delicious, fresh coffee. Things to do: Read
about places where coffee grows like With
an adult, place half a cup of green coffee beans in an old
air-popcorn-popper. (Your fundraising
coordinator can arrange to get green coffee beans for you from the Sturbridge
Coffee Roasters.) Place the popper
outside or in a garage and plug it in.
After about 15 minutes you should hear the beans start to crack. Little pieces of bean covering (or chaff)
will begin to fly out of the popper.
Immediately, stop the popper and dump the beans onto a baking tray and
fan them to cool. Don’t touch the
beans until they are completely cool or they will burn you! Talk
to friends and family that drink coffee and ask why they prefer certain
coffee blends or coffee from a certain country. Often they will tell you it’s because they
visited that place so they have a nice memory of that kind of coffee;
sometimes they will buy a certain coffee because that’s what they’ve always
had in the past.
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Coffee Roasting Tour Green
Beans Arrive in Burlap bags averaging 150 pounds each.
The
green beans arrive
Dropping
the Beans into the Roaster
Checking
the Roast
Light
Roast
Dropping
the Beans into the cooling bin
Cooling
the Beans |
