Coffee, part 3 - The seeds of the world.

How one little thing can make your whole day.

It Thursday morning in Montana. I’ve been having vivid dreams. I tend to dream the most in the early morning, I think anyways, because it seems like I awaken from dreams only the morning. I have a mixed relationship with dreams. My mind is wildly vivid, colorful, and the story telling I love to embrace in my waking hours as a writer seems to go off the deep end a little in my sleep. Sometimes it goes too far. Sometimes it crosses from colorful to disturbing. Often I don’t even remember the specifics, I just wake up in a blur with the feeling I’m glad to be awake. There have been mornings when I awake from a dream I do not care to go back to, but decide, what the hell, I’ll just doze off again, with the assumption that now that it’s been interrupted there isn’t much chance of returning to it, only to find that I’m right back in the same mental place inside the dream world. That is wild to me. I didn’t think it was supposed to work that way. But it has several times.

Sometimes the dreams are pleasant even if exciting. Last night was one such dream. I saved some one or something, I can’t recall the specifics, from an underwater capsule that was sinking off a pier. Capsule as in, very large pill form capsule, like large enough to hold people. Something like that. Strange, yes. I woke up as I emerged from the water, the sun was out. I sat down on the pier, suddenly alone with the sunshine. The light came into my eyes. I could feel it on my skin. I woke up to my bedroom. The light also coming in, now real, true. My mind felt foggy but well rested. I quietly snuck out of the room in the dim light, went downstairs and began heating water for coffee.

While the machine warmed and the water heated I decided to go for a quick zip down to the creek. This is my two prong approach to waking. Sometimes coffee before creek. Sometimes creek before coffee.

It’s about 38 F outside and the bike ride feels good & brisk. The light is still dim, the sun still behind the mountain, though plenty of light to see. My studded bike tires break the lingering ice that coats the trail. In a few days this trail will be fully clear, each day the snow and ice retreat a little more. Acre runs beside me and we get to the creek in about 5 minutes with a few pauses along the way for him to sniff and mark. The air feels good and I strip down to next to nothing. Once in the creek I feel vividly awake. The body has no option but to center on alertness when it’s sitting in 37 degree water for several minutes. As I’m sitting there, creek water encapsulating my entire body up to my neck, I watch as the light slowly crests on the eastern ridgeline horizon of the valley and sun beams instantly make direct contact with my eyes and face and it feels great.

From down stream where the creek bends and a number of leaning cottonwoods hang over the narrowing water, I see a large bird gently flying through the trees approaching, an eagle, meandering between the cottonwood and ponderosas that stand along this creek bank. It flies slowly towards me, and I wish for a moment I had a camera, taking pictures in my minds eye, it slowly flies directly over me and then further up, disappearing in the north. Everything is so quiet. A squirrel chattering across from a nearby tree. I look over my shoulder and see Acre just sitting looking at the squirrel. He’s just watching. Everything just so.

After a few minutes, counted with my breath alone, I crawl out and dry off, standing on a small patch of snow, the cold burns the bottom of my feet. I love this feeling of cold that awakes the nerves from toes to scalp. I dry off and work my way back to the trail, hopping across the small channel to this island, and back up the bank to where I leaned my orange bike. Acre finds a stick he’s interested in and carries it the entire way home. Now the sun is well over the ridge line and the front of the house is basking in warm light. I pause and take it in my eyes. Huberman would approve.

Now for coffee. I’m already well awake on these days when I swim before coffee, but there is one more component of the coffee that no other thing quite taps into. Perhaps it is the ritual of making something warm. Perhaps it is the caffeine in my blood system. But I think it’s more than that. I think there is something beyond the caffeine in the chemistry of it all that makes coffee such an invaluable part of the day. If it was just the caffeine I’d likely be fine with hot chocolate or tea or an “energy” drink, but the fact of the matter is, none of those scratch the itch that coffee does, which tells me there is something more. Something in the chemistry of coffee, perhaps hidden in its alkaline chemistry, as coffee contains over 1000 chemical components. Before roasting it has been determined that green coffee alone contains 300 components that affect flavor and aroma alone, and after roasting this number increases to somewhere around 850! There is, in my best guess anyways, something far more affecting than just flavor senses as these components. Of all these known chemical components available in coffee, well under 100 have been studied for their affect on the human body. So there is considerable unknown, with regards to scientific understanding, which leads me to call it what it feels like when positive experiences result from unknowns… magic. Sure, someday this will all be broken down, but for now, I’m quite happy letting myself rest in the unknown and enjoy the yet to be scientifically described reaction that occurs when these hundreds of chemical components take hold in my body…. Coffee is far more than just caffeine. Coffee is in fact transcendent. For me, it is a gateway to mental clarity right on par, though completely differently, with sitting in frigid water. So when I combine the two, cold water followed by hot coffee, my mind and body feel awake, alert, alive, and fully prepared for whatever the day brings. My ideal days have both. Sometimes it’s one or the other, though while I have occasionally had to forgo my cold swim, rarely have I gone a day without coffee.

Around this incredible plant seed I like many people have habitual preferences for preparation that many consider a form of ritual. Ritual denotes ceremony, but also habit, repetition, and doing something the same way over and over because of the value such repetition results in. I think it’s safe to say most of us who love coffee find some truth to that. I have methods I have honed in over the years for all my brew methods that I prefer to other deviations. For me, the ritual connection of coffee comes in my own preparation of the drink. I like to make coffee. 99 out of 100 days, or more, I am the one that makes coffee in our house in the morning. I just really like making coffee. I like the grinding and the smell that emerges before the coffee has even made contact with water. I love the change in aroma that occurs as hot water begins to hit the beans, soak in, and the steam spreads the smell of the coffee through the kitchen. I love the smell as it the steam rises from the cup. I love the first sip. I love sitting drinking it, feeling the slow hold of caffeine, and those 1000 other components I don’t understand or have a name for, as they spread through my vascular system and make me feel ever more awake and alert and connected to my own consciousness. Coffee, like cold water, cuts the fog of sleep and evaporates it on contact. And I love the process of it all.

So what is coffee, beyond just a small seed? And why do people call it a bean?I don’t necessarily have an answer for the later, perhaps it’s called a bean because, once roasted it resembles a small black bean. But it’s not a legume. It is just a simple seed. Coffee grows on trees. They tend to be short trees, and some refer to them as shrubs, but from what I’ve read, they are more technically trees than shrubs. Coffee trees has many sub-species and variations. And while it grows naturally and now wildly in many parts of the world, its origin point lies in the area of modern day Ethiopia.

Coffee grows naturally in forests throughout Ethiopia. In some areas like this subspecies of coffee are still being discovered. Note the natural shade it grows in. This is the natural state of coffee growing.

Sometime around the 15th century coffee made it’s way across the Red Sea to Yemen and is recorded in use with Oromo people who used both the cherry and seedling with animal fat to make a high density, long lasting, calorically dense food ball, well suited for their militaristic endeavors. As coffee made it across the Red Sea, something long lasting began to form and has quite literally shaped the world as we know it. Coffee became a commodity of global trade. During the last 500 years it has helped lay the very ground work for what we think of as international commerce.

Coffee spread slowly at first through the middle east and by the end of the 16th century it had been introduced to Europe by travelers. Coffee has been an important commodity for trade ever since and by the late 1600’s Dutch traders, among others, were planting coffee in India, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia. It didn’t take long before the Germans helped spread it to the Congo, the Portuguese to their own plantations in Angola and Timor. As European nations colonized Africa, they utilized these growing regions to create their own sources of coffee. Coffee spread rapidly around the tropics and when travelers made it across the Atlantic to S. America, coffee came with them, being planted by the Portuguese in Brazil and the Spanish in Colombia. By the mid 1700’s coffee was well established in S. America. By the 1800’s it was planted as far north as Central America and Mexico. Global trade as we know it, was largely in part developed by the coffee trade. So strong is the magic of this little seed inside the human body and mind.

Inside the coffee cherry lies several layers. There is the skin, the fruit, a layer of parchment, a layer of mucilage, and then a husky skin that surrounds the seeds. In a normal coffee cherry there reside two halves of a seed, each one resulting in a “coffee bean” as we think of them. These two seeds face one another at the center of the coffee cherry and hold together with a flat half that lies one against the other, while their outer portion is rounded in the shape of the cherry. There is however a fairly common mutation, sought after in many regards, in which there is only one round seed in the center of the cherry, called a peaberry. The peaberry coffee bean has no flat side as it sits alone inside the cherry.

Harvester sorts his days load because he will be paid based on the uniformity of ripeness of what he’s picked that day.

After harvest there are a couple routes the coffee can take, that will greatly affect the flavor. I realize we are in the weeds a bit here but this step in the process is one of the most influential outside roasting that will affect the flavor. There is actually a lot of variations within these two descriptions I’m about to offer, but as an introduction I’ll keep it simplified. After harvest the coffee cherry is either immediately washed through a mechanism that removes its fruit before it is dried, or it is dried with the fruit in tact. This results in a “washed coffee” which is the most common throughout the world’s bulk coffee, or a “natural processed” coffee in which the fruit is allowed to dry in tact on the coffee seed. The “natural process” is essentially allowing the fruit to dry like a raisin while the seed is still encapsulated, allowing the sugars from the cherry to affect the fermentation process that occurs during drying.

Both methods require drying though. This happens a couple different ways. It is important to remember that coffee, being one of the world’s largest commodities, has an incredibly large span of how it is handled. For the bulk of coffee sold around the world, it is done as cheaply, and quickly as possible. 90% of the world’s coffee market is dominated by 50 companies. I operate a small specialty company, and specialty companies are using only a tiny fraction of the world’s coffee, and as such, speciality coffee is treated entirely differently. For example, commodity coffee might be mechanically harvested from vast flat plantations in Brazil. Not only are those soils not necessarily suited for coffee, requiring extensive chemical inputs to allow maximal output, but the machines are completely without discernment with regards to whether or not a cherry is ripe for picking. Compare to specialty coffee farms which are generally owned by very small producers, often family entities, where speciality coffee is not only grown without heavy need for chemical inputs, but is also harvested based on ripeness, and processed by hand with specific details in the processing. Commodity coffee is generally put into large driers that dry the coffee in a matter of hours.

The process of removing fruit on "washed coffees" is typically quite laborious, and done the day of harvest, often on location or near bye in shared facilities.

Specialty coffee on the other hand is dried in a laborious, slow fashion that leads to a higher quality coffee that has more nuanced flavor. Specialty farmers are paid far more for their endeavors as well. Washed coffee, after the fruit is removed is laid on large concrete, dirt patios or raised beds and allowed to dry over the course of 2-3 weeks. It is raked daily to keep from molding, and the slow curing process creates a higher quality end coffee. “Natural Processed” coffee, in which the fruit is allowed to dry on the seeds, are placed in large raised beds, basically massive tables with screen bottoms allowing for air flow from above and below. They also are turned over the course of 2-3 weeks, to allow a slow drying before the fruit is removed in a dry mill. Washed coffee also goes through a “dry mill” which removes the remaining parchment that surrounds the seed. At this point the seed is a light, bright green color. For natural processed coffee the color tends to have slightly reddish hue to the green. The smell of a dried washed coffee seed is like warm grass where as the natural coffee has a bit of an apple cider smell in which the fermentation smell is more vigorous. Commodity coffee sees no such nuance.

Natural processed coffee drying with its fruit intact on raised beds. This woman and I did not speak the same language what so ever but we totally cracked each other up during my visit. She may well have been laughing at, not with me, but we had a great time none the less.

The coffee is then shipped to destination. Roasting has the final, most influential roll in its ability to make or break a good coffee. A poorly processed coffee, one that is picked before ripeness, rushed during drying or dried too little or too much, has very little likelihood in being good in the cup. It can be burned to taste like any other burnt coffee though. But that is not ever where my interest has been. A good quality coffee can be roasted into something delicious, but it can also just be burned in which case it will taste like most burnt coffee. That is a flavor I have no interest in. I don’t like it any more than I like burnt toast, which is to say, not at all.

Roasting can make or break the coffee. As a roaster it is an exciting process. There are a lot of options as to how dark or light to make the coffee which greatly affects the outcome in the cup. Lastly of course is the brew process. Brewing can certainly make or break the coffee, but if it is roasted properly it is a bit harder to mess it up with brewing short of just absolutely using the improper amount.

Here is where I see things like coffee, coffee viewed as a simple, basic pleasure, coffee as an important albeit soft spoken ritual to ones day, as a thing that highlights a pause in time, that sparks a general setting and tone for the day, why it matters. Coffee, like so much of our lives, has been commoditized and bastardized. The international shell that represents coffee, the 50 largest producers producing 90% of the worlds coffee, are doing so without much regard to the final product. It’s a simple numbers game, played at a global scale. But it doesn't have to be like that. When you find a small roaster that puts the time and care into what they do, you are finding something much deeper in value. You are finding a product that was likely grown by a small handful of farmers and their families that took great care to make sure the soil was cared for that in turns makes the coffee grow better. Most likely there were other food crops being grown by that same farmer all around that those coffee trees. And after harvesting only the ripest cherries, a process that will be repeated over the course of several days, even a couple weeks depending on the weather and seasonal specifics, they will dry them with precision to 8-12% water content, a stable amount that will ward off any molds and but keep the coffee fresh enough to maintain it’s peak flavor after roasting. You are enjoying the product that a small roaster is taking pride in how they roast, to ensure the flavor is peak for that specific varietal and bean. You are essentially enjoying an entirely different level product. And in a world that is increasingly become more generic, more monotone, less colorful, less interesting, I am a firm believer in supporting the small producer.

A similar, though completely different thing can be looked at in the lens of shoes. I buy running shoes about once a year. They are relatively cheaply made, and sadly disposable. I like them. The fit ok. They serve their purpose. But they are just that… just ok and don’t last or bring any particular joy other than they serve a specific function. However about 15 years ago I bought a pair of custom shoes, hand made in Spokane, Washington. These shoes fit my feet. They were made for me. And they were built to last. They can be resoled. They are built of materials that last, and with a craftsmanship that shows the quality of their design and thought in being sewn. Those shoes were certainly more expensive than any running shoe by several times, but they have lasted and still reflect the quality with which they were built. I take great pleasure in sliding my feet into them every time.

We need to support more local producers. In a world that seems hellbent on being ever cheaper and more generic, I want better things, not just infinitely more things. It is the quality of the thing that brings far more satisfaction than an endless quantity. A ritual built around cheap plastic things is hardly a ritual in my mind. So it is with pleasure I drink my morning coffee knowing the chain of events that were required to bring it to my cup. From a seedling cared for in a nursery for its first year, hand planted, tended to for the five years or so it takes before it can produce fruit. With great coffee someone took the time move through the coffee farm selecting only ripe cherries to harvest. They were carried up and down steep slopes, often manually run through the washing station, or spread out by hand over raised drying tables. The drying process saw hours each day of moving the coffee around so the drying takes place evenly and to the proper level. And sorted for quality. Roasted carefully with specificity and precision. So when I take those last steps of grinding and brewing my coffee there is a deeper knowledge in what has lead to that moment. The ritual is about something of quality. And the resulting cup, as it steams in my kitchen, the smell, the colors, everything about it is just right.

So that is my morning cup. The chemistry that flows through my body I do not fully understand, but I understand the process of how it came to be, and how it makes a difference in my day. A good cup of coffee is like the seed for a good day. It starts at the source. From that cup my day spreads out and carries the moment of my day. Eventually the draw is too much and I have another. And sometimes a third and maybe fourth. Then as I finish my day, winding down into night, preparing to sleep, preparing to dream, my thoughts inevitably leave the moment and I think about morning. I think about the next cup I’ll drink. How I’ll brew it. My mind adrift in the anticipation of the smell and taste of the first sip. That is the power of coffee. And if that is not magic I’m not sure what is

Coffee production is over 170 million 60 Kilo bags in 2024. It is one of the world’s largest traded commodities and in the US consumed daily by roughly 60% of the population.