Victoria Coffee Information Center

Coffee (Fr. café), specially in Americas, is the staple of most beverage menus. Despite its relatively low price, a good cup of coffee can be extremely important to a customer's impression of your food service operation. A cup of coffee is often either the very first or the very last item consumed by a customer.

Consequently, it is important that you learn to prepare and serve this beverage properly. Coffee begins as the fruit of a small tree grown in tropical and subtropical regions throughout the world. The fruit, referred to as a cherry, is bright red with translucent flesh surrounding two flat-sided seeds. These seeds are the coffee beans.

When ripe, the cherries are harvested by hand, then cleaned, fermented and hulled, leaving the green coffee beans. The beans are then roasted, blended, ground and brewed. Note that any coffee bean can be roasted to any degree of darkness, ground to any degree of fineness and brewed by any number of methods.

Only two species of coffee bean are routinely used; arabica and robusta. Arabica beans are the most important commercially and the ones from which the finest coffees are produced. Robusta beans do not produce as flavorful a drink as arabica. Nevertheless, robusta beans are becoming increasingly significant commercially, in part because robusta trees are heartier and more fertile than Arabic trees.

Coffee contains a complex mixture of chemical components of the bean, some of which are not affected by roasting. Other compounds, particularly those related to the aroma, are produced by partial destruction of the green bean during roasting.

Chemicals extracted by hot water are classified as nonvolatile taste components and volatile aroma components. Important nonvolatiles are caffeine, trigonelline, chlorogenic acid, phenolic acids, amino acids, carbohydrates, and minerals.

Important volatiles are organic acids, aldehydes, ketones, esters, amines, and mercaptans.

The principal physiological effects of coffee are due to caffeine, an alkaloid that acts as a mild stimulant. In recent years controversy arose over the possibly harmful effects of coffee beyond those recognized for people who should take few or no stimulants, and the dangers of caffeine for the fetuses of pregnant women. These debated studies were not substantiated, however.

Decaffeinated Coffee
Caffeine can be removed from coffee by treating the green beans with chlorinated hydrocarbon solvents. The beans are roasted by ordinary procedures after removal of the solvents. Decaffeinated coffee is used by people hypersensitive to the caffeine present in regular coffee. In the 1980s nonchemical methods of decaffeination became more common.

Exactly where and when coffee was first cultivated is not known, but some authorities believe that it was grown initially in Arabia near the Red Sea about AD675.

Coffee cultivation was rare until the 15th and 16th centuries, when extensive planting of the tree occurred in the Yemen region of Arabia.

The consumption of coffee increased in Europe during the 17th century, prompting the Dutch to cultivate it in their colonies. In 1714 the French succeeded in bringing a live cutting of a coffee tree to the island of Martinique in the West Indies.

This single plant was the genesis of the great coffee plantations of Latin America. Because of the economic importance of coffee exports, a number of Latin American countries made arrangements before World War II (1939-1945) to allocate export

quotas so that each country would be assured a certain share of the United States coffee market.

The first coffee quota agreement was arranged in 1940 and was administered by an Inter-American Coffee Board. The idea of establishing coffee export quotas on a worldwide basis was adopted in 1962, when an International Coffee Agreement was negotiated by the United Nations.

During the five-year period when this agreement was in effect, 41 exporting countries and 25 importing countries acceded to its terms. The agreement was renegotiated in 1968, 1976, and 1983. Participating nations failed to sign a new pact in 1989, however, and world coffee prices plunged.