Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams
Chronicles of a Footloose Forester
By Dick Pellek

Coffee Plants, Coffee Cherries, Coffee Berries, Coffee Beans, Coffee Makers, and Coffee Cups

The whole world knows something about coffee.  Many millions of people drink it every day.  A few million are involved in growing it, hundreds of thousands are engaged in harvesting it, processing it, packaging it, shipping it, advertising it, and selling it.  But what is coffee?  A plant?  Yes.  A crop? Yes.  A commodity? Yes.  The contents of a recognizable container?  Yes.  A familiar package wrapped in double-lined paper? Yes.  An item on the shopping list? Yes. The stuff you put in the brewing device we know as a coffee maker? Yes.  The sole ingredient you spoon into a funny looking pot with a removable filter? Yes. The stuff we drink early in the morning? Yes.  The drink we offer to guests who show up unexpectedly?  Yes. The sophisticated post-dining offering après-feast?  Yes. The one consumable many us declare that we could not live without?  Yes.

Yes, the whole world knows something about coffee, and they start learning at an early age.  But Coffee World is bigger than any one person knows on a personal level.  It is easy enough and safe enough to generalize about coffee, and throw-away anecdotes would likely go without meaningful challenges.  Serious discussions about coffee must engage the splitters, to amplify and broaden the knowledge of the realm of coffee culture; and of the genuine chain of custody in making coffee in your cup a daily enjoyment.

Some Chronicles of a Footloose Forester are whimsical, some are quasi-professional tomes, many are biographical, and quite a few are based on reprised dreams.  Furthermore, many contain anecdotes if for no other reason than the realization that observational anecdotes are more likely to endure in the hard-wired section of the memory banks of the Footloose Forester.  Without peer review and scolding from his reading public, the Footloose Forester is content to continue writing chronicles laced with anecdotes.  Being On the road…again in many interesting places around the globe gave him a perspective that he likes to share.  Take it or leave it.

In this aspirational chronicle about coffee, the first thing that the Footloose Forester wants everyone to know is his delight with having the opportunities of seeing coffee plants growing at individual homesteads, in small plantations, and in several countries.  Seeing how coffee farmers plant, tend, and nurture coffee plants was always instructional; besides he was tasked with working on a coffee growers’ support project in Haiti, was an occasional visitor to coffee farms in the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Kenya, Burundi, Hawaii, Costa Rica, and Ethiopia.  The first stage of coffee growing held the most interest because it was at that stage when improvements and support for growers was most important.  As one latent advertising slogan put it, “a good cup of coffee starts with good coffee beans, and good beans come from…”  It all starts with the beans that become plant seedlings.  Laymen can’t generally tell one coffee bean from another, but coffee growers know, buyers know, and connoisseurs of coffee unwittingly know. 

By way of anecdote, the Footloose Forester believes that growers don’t have much to say about fresh coffee grounds in a can or package in a market, but they are keen observers when the green beans begin to turn bright red and ready for harvest.  Picking coffee beans as relatively mature cherries is not much different than picking real cherries.  They wait until the proper time so that the flavor is locked in.  Regardless of whether the cherries are harvested by the farmers themselves or by contract pickers, the next stage is the further maturation of the beans in coffee washing stations.

Coffee washing in specially constructed washing stations is institutionalized in some places, such is the value placed on the eventual commodity of salable coffee beans on the world market.  At this stage, an ancient anecdote from the memory banks of the Footloose Forester comes to the fore.  When doing an environmental monitoring study tour in Ethiopia in 1993, three of us USAID observers from Kenya stopped in at a coffee washing station that was going full tilt.  The friendly foreman of the group insisted that each of us drive away with two kilos of washed and dried coffee beans.  Six kilos of beans was a very big chunk of his inventory, but he insisted that we accept the coffee beans as a gift.  He may have also reminded us that coffee as a species of plant originated in Ethiopia.  Fast forward some 2-3 months, when the Bengal Tiger, wife of the Footloose Forester, roasted the Ethiopian coffee beans in a shallow pan in her kitchen.  We subsequently ground the beans for brewing and, of course, made coffee in a pot.  Ouch!  It was the most vile tasting coffee we had ever sipped.  There may be worse, but we never had that misfortune.

There are good reasons why there are professional coffee tasters sojourning here and there in coffee growing regions of the world.  Juan Valdez may be one the most famous fictional character in coffee advertising, with his donkey laden with superior coffee beans, but tasting before buying is a part of the game.  In the humble opinion of the Footloose Forester, both local growers and commercial producers of “industrial crops” such as coffee and tea have a big stake in keeping the markets happy with superior commodities.  He also believes that producers sell their very best abroad and keep the mediocre stuff at home.  At least, that is what his taste buds told him regarding locally produced coffee, tea, and even tobacco products.  Not all coffee tastes the same; not all tea tastes the same, and not all cigarettes smell the same. 

In this updated installment of this draft chronicle, a few more anecdotes come to mind about coffee processing, marketing, and preparation in your personal coffee maker.  The Footloose Forester will seek to be kind to Starbucks and the mystique of the coffee klatch.

Homeowners likely favor one coffee brand over another and normally buy the same brand.  Of course, there are store sales and marketers sometimes reduce prices to tempt you buy their brand on sale and henceforth change brands. At home, the Footloose Forester often had two or more brands on the shelf, thus readily came up with two different coffee brands that we had in the kitchen, to use in an experiment about what measure of grounds to use to make a single cup; but to clarify what the volume of a cup really is.  Both Maxwell House and Folgers had printed instructions for preparing a single cup of coffee—one Tablespoon of grounds for each typical cup of 6 ounces.  Next the Footloose Forester prepared the demonstration by selecting a shallow bowl.  He added a single Tablespoon of coffee grounds to the empty plastic coffee scoop we have been using for years.  A heaping Tablespoon of grounds was more than double the amount that would fit into our plastic scoop.

After replacing the dry grounds back into its original container, he repeated the exercise using a level Tablespoon.  It was still about double the capacity of our favored scoop. Then he chose a teaspoon to measure out one scoop.  Even the smaller teaspoon of grounds exceeded the volume capacity of our plastic scoop.  Alas, there is neither a standard volume Tablespoon nor a standard teaspoon in our drawer.  What may look like a Tablespoon doesn't always contain the standard measure of a Tablespoon.  The same goes for a teaspoon--they come in slightly different sizes, so have slightly different measures.  Likewise, coffee scoops come in different sizes.

Another problem with assuming that written instructions are reasonable has to do with the glass carafe that collects the percolated coffee in our coffee maker.  The numbers etched into the side of the carafe do not refer to the actual number of cups percolated.  Each successive volume marking from 2-12 does not means cups, partly because there is no standard size for coffee cups. If a person measures out the water in a 6-once cup, you discover that a little more than 5 cups fills our carafe up to the number 12 marking.  

Thus, plain water added to the #12 marking makes 5-6 cups of coffee, regardless of strength. Anyone of the opinion that the manufacturer meant that it suggests the number of cups brewed should think again.

We also had the opportunity to compare volume measurements with another coffee maker and its carafe, at the apartment of our in-laws.  The small Faberware coffe maker with the carafe marked as 4 cups used one 16.9 ounce plastic bottle of water, to the exact level.  Since the water at the correct level may have yielded 4 cups,  each cup was calculated at 4.22 ounces each.