Monday, April 22, 2013

How Coffee Brings The Planet Together

  • The best coffee comes from high altitudes with a warm climate like inHuehuetenango, Guatemala.
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    The greatest coffee comes from large altitudes with a warm climate like in

    Huehuetenango, Guatemala.

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    David Gilkey/NPR
  • Farmers gather coffee beans in Yunnan Province, China.
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    Farmers gather coffee beans in Yunnan Province, China.
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    China Photographs /Getty Photos
  • Workers separate beans at a coffee warehouse in Yirgacheffe, Ethiopia. Coffee originated in Ethiopia, but now grows in more than 50 countries around the world.
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    Workers separate beans at a coffee warehouse in Yirgacheffe, Ethiopia. Coffee originated in Ethiopia, but now grows in much more than 50 countries close to the globe.
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    Michael Tsegaye/Bloomberg via Getty Photographs
  • Workers clean coffee beans at the Los Ausoles coffee plantation in Ahuachapan, El Salvador. Global exports of green coffee beans are worth $15 billion a year.
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    Employees clean coffee beans at the Los Ausoles coffee plantation in Ahuachapan, El Salvador. International exports of green coffee beans are worth $15 billion a year.
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    YURI CORTEZ/AFP/Getty Photographs
  • A woman rakes coffee beans that are drying at a coffee plant in Matagalpa, Nicaragua. Coffee is the country's top export.
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    A woman rakes coffee beans that are drying at a coffee plant in Matagalpa, Nicaragua. Coffee is the country's leading export.
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    Jean-Marc Bouju/AP Photograph
  • Forty percent of all coffee comes from Brazil. Here, coffee plantation workers pour sun-dried coffee beans into burlap sacks in Minas Gerais.
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    Forty percent of all coffee comes from Brazil. Right here, coffee plantation employees pour sun-dried coffee beans into burlap sacks in Minas Gerais.
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    Benjamin Lowy/Getty Photos
  • Vietnamese farmers grow a species of coffee tree called Robusta. It grows fast and produces a big crop, but the bean has a bitter taste. Pictured is a coffee shop in Hanoi, Vietnam.
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    Vietnamese farmers grow a species of coffee tree named Robusta. It grows fast and generates a huge crop, but the bean has a bitter taste. Pictured is a coffee store in Hanoi, Vietnam.
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    HOANG DINH NAM/AFP/GettyImages
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    An Indonesian "Starbikes" vendor prepares coffee from his bicycle for street laborers in Jakarta.
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Coffee is much more than a drink. For numerous of us Ok, for me it is woven into the material of each and every day.

It also connects us to far corners of the globe.

For instance, every single Friday, a truck pulls up to the warehouse of Counter Culture Coffee, a tiny roaster and coffee distributor in Durham, N.C., and unloads a bunch of hefty burlap sacks.

On any random day, that truck could carry " ten bags from a farm in El Salvador 20 bags from a cooperative in Burundi two bags of a particular coffee from Guatemala," says Kim Elena Ionescu, a single of the coffee customers for Counter Culture Coffee. She travels the world, visiting coffee farms and deciding which beans the company will obtain.

The best coffee, she says, comes from substantial altitudes, but you can't expand it in areas that freeze, "so you require that mixture of higher altitude and warm climate, which makes the tropics the location to develop it."

All across Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia, men and women grow coffee.

In a lot of tropical nations, particularly bad ones, it truly is a pillar of the economic system exports of green coffee beans, globally, are worth $15 billion a yr.

Some of these farms, Ionescu says, are idyllic places, high in the mountains. Taller trees generally shade the coffee bushes. Such scenes "hearken a little bit to coffee's homeland, which is Ethiopia," Ionescu says. "Southwestern Ethiopia is truly lush, it really is got amazingly higher altitudes, it can be green, misty."

But honestly, even though there are hundreds of thousands of tiny, idyllic coffee farms, they aren't producing the majority of the world's coffee.

Most coffee is not specialty coffee. It is just coffee: Major cans of it, or instantaneous coffee.

Forty % of all coffee comes from Brazil, and the common coffee farm in Brazil looks much more like a corn farm in Iowa, Ionescu says "coffee plants as far a the eye can see, unbroken by any type of tree."

When it's time for harvest in Brazil, major machines roll by way of and strip off the cherry-like coffee fruit, with its valuable bean within.

The 2nd - largest producer in the globe is a surprise for numerous persons : Vietnam. "Not a great deal of persons, in particular in specialty coffee, speak about Vietnam," says Ionescu.

Vietnamese farmers develop a species of coffee tree known as Robusta. (The scientific identify is Coffea canephora.) It grows rapidly and generates a major crop, but the bean has a bitter taste. It truly is often employed in blends, specifically in Europe. But high - end coffee producers like Counter Culture steer clear of it. They stick to one more species arabica.

This is a single massive divide in the coffee small business. On a single side is "commodity" coffee on the other, small businesses like Counter Culture Coffee, or even big ones like Starbucks, or Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, which promote coffee that's been additional meticulously harvested and graded. These organizations market place coffee virtually like wine, labeling exactly where it came from and how it tastes.

At Green Mountain's headquarters in Waterbury, Vt., tasters suck in mouthfuls of fresh brew, pause to reflect, then give just about every sample a score and speak about what they are super- delicate taste buds picked up. "Chocolate, melon, lime, subtle peach," says 1 taster.

Specialty coffee like this accounts for only a small component possibly ten or 15 % of the worldwide coffee market.

Often, these two sides of the coffee enterprise seem to be to reside in distinct worlds. But Counter Culture Coffee's Ionescu says they often come together in surprising techniques.

"You know, what's interesting to me is the large proportion of coffee growers who drink quick coffee, even on some of these idyllic hillsides in Central America," she says.

Instead of consuming their personal best - top quality coffee, they export it to individuals who can pay much more for it, this kind of as Europeans or Americans.

Lindsey Bolger, director of coffee for Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, says if you measure the volume of coffee consumed per coffee drinker, the world champions reside in Nordic countries. " Based on which nation, they're up to eight cups of coffee per particular person, per day. In the U.S., we're at perhaps two or 2. five cups of coffee per day," she says.

Americans truly used to drink a good deal more coffee. Per particular person, we drank just about twice as much through World War II.

People used to divide the coffee world neatly into producers, like Brazil, and consuming nations in Western Europe and North America.

Bolger says individuals clear lines are obtaining blurred. Brazil could quickly overtake the United States to become the world's single greatest coffee-consuming country, she says, and "we're seeing considerable growth in consumption in regions like Southeast Asia, South Korea, Eastern Europe, India, and the Gulf nations."

The coffee knowledge, it appears, is far more global than ever.


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