Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation (8 page)

This massive coffee industry started very small in northern Africa, probably somewhere in Ethiopia's southwestern highlands,
though not necessarily Yirgacheffe. DNA analysis suggests this general area is where
Coffea arabica
first appeared, sometime between 500,000 and one million years ago.
⁹
Coffee existed long before there were any modern humans around to appreciate this flowering evergreen with shiny leaves and fruit resembling (in appearance, not taste) a brilliant red cherry. Inside the cherry lies the coffee bean, which is not a bean at all but two semicircular seeds.

Coffea
evolved from a large family of plants known as Rubiaceae, whose “tribes” also include gardenias, hydrangeas, and plants that produce key ingredients for important medicines, such as quinine, the first effective treatment for malaria, and coumarin, used in the anticoagulant drug warfarin. The only real “food” in the group—although it contains almost no calories when brewed—is
Coffea
, of which there are numerous types, the most prized and commonly used being
arabica
.

Legend surrounds the discovery of the delicious properties of the
arabica
seeds, which could not reveal their secret until properly prepared and roasted. The most beloved origin story is the Arabian tale of a clever young goatherd named Kaldi, who one day observed how surprisingly peppy his goats became after munching on the fruit of the coffee plant. The excited boy went to the nearest monastery, showed the fruit to one of the monks, and told him of its amazing effects. The dubious holy man threw the stuff into the fire, only to be captivated by the aroma emanating from the burning fruit. The holy man and his companions then decided to place the roasted beans into boiling water as if making tea, and so coffee was born—at least in legend. The tale of Kaldi and the holy man has a multitude of versions and all are almost certainly mythical, given that there was no recorded account of the Kaldi story until about eight hundred years after the events were said to have taken place. But the charming origin tale has endured.

The first historically reliable account of anyone drinking roasted and brewed coffee as we know it today dates back to the fifteenth century in the Yemen region of the Arabian Peninsula, where it was used in religious devotions in Sufi monasteries.
¹⁰
But coffee was just too good for the monks to keep to themselves, and it soon spread throughout Arabia, then Persia, Turkey, and every other part of the Middle East, where coffeehouses started springing up throughout the Islamic world like Middle Ages Starbucks. Within a century, the enterprising traders of Venice had brought coffee to Europe, where it survived an attempted ban as a heathen evil after the pope tried some and gave it an official papal thumbs-up in 1600. With a new coffee trade thriving between growers in Africa and importers in Europe, Dutch traders found the plant could be grown in Java and Ceylon (now Indonesia and Sri Lanka) as well. Not to be outdone, the French brought it to their New World colonies, and coffee plantations soon sprang up in the Caribbean. Next the
arabica
plants gained a foothold in South America, where they thrived, and in time Brazil and Colombia would become leading coffee-growing countries. A long history of colonialism, slavery, and exploitation ensued, and the exploitation persisted for centuries. Only relatively recently, through pressure for industry reforms and the fair trade movement, have conditions and compensation begun to improve for the estimated 25 million family farmers and producers in 50 countries who subsist on coffee.

The
arabica
coffee plant flourishes in tropical climates at altitudes ranging from 3,500 to 5,500 feet above sea level, with the best results in hilly areas with partial shade. The majority of beans are handpicked, with each plant requiring multiple pickings because the ripening comes in stages over the course of six to eight weeks. Poorer grades are just swept up at once, picked by machine where the terrain allows it.

The freshly picked coffee cherries have to be processed immediately, as the outer fruit rots very quickly, degrading the flavor and quality of the beans within. This is the part of the process that makes or breaks good coffee, and Isais travels each year to visit his source farms to see how it's done and if it's done right. For
arabica
beans, the most common procedure—called the wet process—requires immersing the beans in open water tanks resembling swimming pools, where natural fermentation causes the fruit to slough off the beans. Then the beans are dried, a task accomplished on small farms by spreading the wet beans on outdoor patios or platforms, turning them occasionally by hand. Large estates employ huge tumbling commercial dryers for the task. Once dry, a final mechanical hulling removes the thin parchment that encases the seeds, somewhat like the papery skin inside a peanut. Some farmers—those in Yirgacheffe among them—still use the ancient “dry method,” by which the fruit is allowed to dry like a raisin in the sun, then is removed from the beans through a milling process. It's harder to get consistent results this way, but when done with care, this sort of coffee is valued for its very complex and intense flavors.

All of this work typically takes place in the coffee's source country, usually near the farm, and in some areas even the smallest family farms do the processing themselves or in small cooperatives. Other growers rely on local businesses to buy the freshly picked cherries and process batches of local beans from many growers. But this is the one stage where coffee doesn't wander very far from its tree. Adding too many travel miles at this stage would take too much time and reduce the grade of the coffee and therefore its price. So in the coffee world at least, the ancient rules hold for the freshly picked fruit: time and distance is the enemy, and no technology or shipping container or shiny outsourced factory can stop the spoilage and beat the clock.

After processing, the beans are separated into as many as fourteen grades based on size, consistency, appearance, and quality, with the top grades going to the specialty coffee buyers such as Isais, and the rest to commercial buyers or instant coffee factories at a much lower price. The bottom grades are too poor to be exported and are consumed locally, if at all.

There are dozens of people making decisions about how to handle each of the stages of gathering and processing, and an entire coffee lot can be ruined by any one of them. “That's the truth of coffee,” Isais says. “It can never be made any better, but there are a thousand ways to make it worse along the way.”

When the coffee emerges from the final milling as raw green beans, the rules governed by coffee's fragility change: the green beans are sturdy and can last months, even a full year, with little or no care required. The green beans pass to agents and brokers who aggregate coffee from small lots in a region and sell to exporters, who deal with the coffee buyers and their brokers and agents worldwide. It's a convoluted process, and it's not unusual for coffee to pass through many ownership changes before reaching a consumer. Sometimes coffee can be purchased directly without all the middlemen, and this “estate coffee” is sold like a premium wine. The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf has been buying directly from the same coffee agent in Yirgacheffe for fifty years, Isais says, allowing it to obtain beans from the same estate of small landholders in the village near the birthplace of coffee.

At the other end of the quality spectrum is a different variety of coffee, made from the plant
Coffea canephora
(or
Coffea robusta
), commonly called
robusta
coffee. It's grown primarily in Brazil and a relative newcomer to the coffee game, Vietnam, which has no significant
arabica
production. As the name implies,
robusta
is a heartier plant than
arabica
, less fussy about altitude and climate, perfectly happy to grow in flatlands where
mechanical picking is easy and cheap, and it even has 50 percent more caffeine.
Robusta
would be the perfect coffee for the modern world but for one thing: the taste. Most people find it bitter, biting, and far less appealing than
arabica
coffee.

But like bad wine,
robusta
has its attractions: low cost. Its bargain prices make it a preferred choice for instant coffees, compensating for the added cost of the instant coffee process, which does not ruin coffee flavors in itself. The big commercial brands often mix
robusta
along with
arabica
in their canned coffee blends (the precise blend ratios are kept secret). Again, this is a cost savings that keeps the price of canned coffee down. According to Isais, the flavor suffers from another cost savings as well: the practice of roasting commercial coffee at a lower temperature in order to avoid losing as little weight as possible as the beans cook and dry out. A pound of under-roasted coffee takes fewer beans than a pound of fully roasted. All this makes for far more affordable coffee, but it's also part of the reason why specialty coffees seem to taste so much better than the old-school canned varieties.

The coffee supply in America is a broad mix. If all coffee,
robusta
and
arabica
alike, from the top ten coffee-growing nations that supply the U.S. market were made into one big blend—call it the American House Blend—this would be the recipe:

That adds up to 90 percent; the rest of the blend would consist of 5 percent coffee from nongrowing broker nation Germany, and fractions of a percent from other producing countries.
¹¹

How would such a well-traveled global blend taste if pulled from our shelves and shops and concocted together? It would be like throwing every sort of wine, cheap and expensive, red and white, sweet and dry, together in one glass, or like mixing all the colors in a watercolor set together on your palette. The result for wine, paint, and coffee would all be remarkably similar: an awful, muddy brown mess.

J
ay Isais's day begins at 6:15 a.m. with—no surprise here—a pot of coffee to share with his wife, Connie. They live near the roasting plant in Camarillo, a town about seventy-five miles north of the Port of Los Angeles. It's a location chosen less out of strategic need and more out of convenience for the founder of the business, who decided to move his home to the picturesque coastal farming area back in the eighties. The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf's headquarters and distribution center are still in the City of Los Angeles.

Isais's home coffeemaker is an ordinary drip model, his main requirement being a thermal carafe that keeps the brew warm without a heating element underneath. Prolonged heat burns the coffee and ruins the taste, he advises. He is most fond of the African coffees and the Yirgacheffe in particular, but he'll save those for later in the day at work. His wife takes cream, which clashes with the higher acidity of many African coffees, leaving a sour aftertaste. So at home he sticks mostly with dairy-friendly Latin American beans.

At the plant, after his routine housekeeping tasks of reading e-mails and checking the coffee market prices, Isais joins master roaster Jesse Martinez in the cupping lab. Samples of new lots of coffee are air-shipped to the plant on a daily basis, flown in by UPS or FedEx from agents, brokers, and growers all over the world. Martinez has already used a tabletop roaster to prepare today's samples and brewed them up, and an array of small coffee cups are laid out in a circle on the high, round tasting table. Each sample—today they're from Costa Rica, Colombia, and Malaysia—is represented by five cups brewed separately, the better to detect inconsistencies in the sample. Small trays of the beans from each lot are on the table, labeled and displayed to show the appearance of the beans and the roast. The beans are judged by look as well as taste; if there are too many discolored, damaged, or undersized beans, the lot will be rejected on visual quality alone.

The two men begin the cupping when the coffee reaches room temperature, the ideal state for judging. Drinking coffee too hot or too cold diminishes the ability to taste accurately. The two men move around the table, leaning in, sniffing with noses close to each cup, then scooping a bit with a teaspoon. The sound of slurping fills the room. It's quite loud, almost comically exaggerated, but for a purpose: a small amount of coffee is sucked in with a large amount of air in order to disperse the drink across the palate. Then the spoon is dipped in a rinse and it's on to the next cup, the slurps coming in rapid fire, cup to cup, lot to lot, delicate flavors first, then moving to the stronger and more intense brews. The two men move around the table across from one another, circling like prizefighters in the ring.

Afterward, they sit back and grade the coffees on aroma, flavor, sweetness (coffee beans are packed with sucrose), acidity, body, balance, uniformity, and aftertaste, as well as whether the
brew leaves a clean cup (as opposed to a gritty one). The last score is the taster's overall impression.

Each category can score a maximum of 10 points, and a total of 80 points is the least a coffee can receive and still be considered “specialty coffee.” Isais usually looks for higher scores. Naturally, there's a smartphone app for this: “Cupping Lab,” which Isais uses to record the scores on his Android phone. This day, the coffees are all judged well above 80, and orders are placed for all of them.