Off The Menu: Beware, Here There Be Pumpkins

Mention flavored coffee to any coffee drinker and you'll either get a reminiscing smile or a bored eye-role. Anyone who's had more than a few cups of joe is familiar with this part of the coffee world, a suburb of rundown nostalgia not unlike the an 80's theme park that still trudges along unchanged: think vanilla, hazelnut, blueberry, Irish cream. Those are the coffees I remember seeing in the aisle at the grocery store, the first coffees I remember liking (okay, finding slightly less disgusting). And those are now the coffees that I and so many other coffee geeks now glare at with the same look of distain a five-star chef would reserve for a hot pocket. But before I lose the flavored coffee supporters out there, let me humbly walk into their most lauded temple, the Pumpkin Spice Latte.

"Come fellow believers, let us ascend to the utmost peak of autumnal bliss!"
-Someone wearing plaid somewhere
Photo by Consumerist

Though it's more of a coffee beverage and the flavor comes from syrup, Starbucks' biggest success might be the biggest representative of what the lovers love (it tastes like sweet sweet sugary fall) and what the haters hate (it doesn't taste like coffee, at all). The Pumpkin Spice Latte has brought about a new era in flavored coffee, an era where a drink has enough faithful adherents to create a secret code so you can get it early, has short stories written about it, and may have kicked off an entire trend of pumpkin flavored foods and beverages. And that's saying something considering that we don't actually like pumpkins unless they're in a pie.

"Aww, pretty pumpkins! Become pie or get lost." -America
Photo by Kim Abbot is licensed under CC BY 2.0

There are probably many reasons for the success of the pumpkin spice latte and the pumpkin cult that followed, but one of the biggest drivers of the flavophiles is that some people don't like the flavor of coffee. Which is an issue because coffee can be delicious. Coffee nerds hold coffee on a pedestal because they've put time and effort into it; they've learned how to make it and how to taste it. Coffee has more flavor compounds than wine: wine sits around 200, but coffee ranges from 850 to 1500, depending on who you ask, making coffee a complex, extremely flavorful beverage. So asking your barista to add some flavored syrup to a cup of single-origin, carefully brewed coffee could be (to them) the equivalent of asking a talented chef to slather ketchup and mustard on his dry aged, perfectly medium-rare T-bone.

"Oh, you want mint syrup in your coffee? Sorry, I think I need to go flip the vinyl
and then make a pour over using a stream of my own tears."
Photo by Matt Biddulph is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

But let's be honest, some coffees aren't worthy of a coffee nerd's tender love and adoration. Specialty coffees make up 37% of the coffee market; that means 63% might not be the kind of cup of coffee you'll want to savor on crisp autumn day while sporting your favorite flannel. And even that is a new trend: for the vast majority of history, coffee wasn't particularly tasty, and needed sugar and milk to make it palatable. And this is where the Pumpkin Spice Latte (and any other flavored coffee or vague coffee drink) has risen to it's glory: not everyone has access to good coffee. And sometimes you just want some drinkable coffee, so much that you'll make a deal with the devil to get it.

"So you want to be able to drink your coffee without cringing?
Oh, I can make that happen... can I ever make that happen."

So flavored coffee makes sense, but it comes with its own downsides: most flavored coffees (and grandiose Starbucks whipped cream receptacles) are flavored chemically, not naturally, and when you get into the world of Starbucks (or any other dessert-coffee purveyor), you're basically drinking candy. What's a coffee lover to do?

May I present the 'JUST GIVE IN' option?
Photo from The Stir

One option would be to go high class with the flavor, something like coffee brewed with dehydrated raspberries and Madagascar cocoa. Yeah, that honestly sounds amazing, but it's also not exactly available to everyone. My humble suggestion to those who can't do coffee straight up: go au naturale with the flavors, and start light, adding just enough to taste both the flavor and the coffee. My marketing department demands I inform you that, at Arabica, we like maple syrup, homemade caramel and chocolate syrup made from real chocolate (and they all taste pretty rad). We even have a pumpkin syrup that's all natural and actually has pumpkin in it at our Commercial St. location, if you must get in the spirit of fall.

But it's your coffee in the end, and the choice is yours. So if it's your thing, go ahead, get the Banana Foster Float coffee, or the Christmas Cookie coffee or the Big Ol' Chunk O' Cake coffee or whatever suits your fancy. Just not the Spicy Taco Flavored coffee. Really, that's just too far. Nobody wants coffee that makes your house smell like you "cooked up some taco seasoning with ground beef in a pan."

That is not a coffee flavor. Not in the slightest.

Manifest Bean: Go West, Young Coffee

Have you ever sat down at a coffee shop, ordered yourself a latte, and found yourself thinking, "Who thought this thing up? Why does this delicious mixture of pressure-extracted coffee and steamed milk exist?" or perhaps a slightly more existential, "How did someone living in America come to drink something made from the ground, roasted seed of the fruit of a tree that originated from Ethiopia?" Okay, you've probably never asked that question, but if you are asking it now you're in luck: mysteries like this baffle and delight me to no end.

"The door is open... but it can be closed... but it's not? THIS IS AMAZING?" -Me everyday
"Problems, problems..." by Ion Chibzii is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Let's start with the origin stories. There's a few. I've mentioned the myth about the Ethiopian goatherd in my first post ever (oh what a young foolish man I was...), but that story didn't appear in print until 1671, a rather suspicious 800 years after it supposedly took place. Other origins attribute either the avian observations of a Sufi mystic or the desert wanderings of exiled disciple of a Sheik (his discovery of coffee not only revoked his exiled status but got him honored as a saint, because, well, you know, coffee!), but as before, it's unclear how exactly coffee was "discovered."

The best guess is that the the tribesman of Ethiopia consumed coffee fruit for its stimulating properties, and at some point a visiter from Yemen tried it and thought it was rather swell. What we do know is that the first written evidence of coffee, as we know it, was in the 15th century in the Sufi monasteries in Yemen, used to keep them alert during prayers. This precious beverage was given the name qahwah, which had originally meant wine.

Except when you drink too much of this wine you just start pretending that you're getting a lot of work done.
Photo by Scott Feldstein is licensed under CC BY 2.0

In its early years, coffee lived a mostly religious life,  doing it's prayers and being a good boy. It was mostly found in areas of Sufi influence, with coffeehouses first popping up around a religious university in Cairo, but coffee quickly spread across the Ottoman empire. The bad news for coffee was that as soon as it stepped out into the world, it's reputation started to sour (or perhaps I should say bitter? sorry). In 1511 coffee was banned by conservative Imams for fear of it being too stimulating, possibly encouraging wandering thoughts, or worse, outright rebellion. Lucky for us the people's love of coffee was so great that the ban only managed to last fifteen years.

In Europe coffee was less liked, with no small part of that caused by its association with Islam. Viewed as the Devil's beverage, the drink of infidels, and all manner of other insults you may apply to potable liquids, coffee was shunned if not outright banned in most of Europe.

"Such mudslop! Truly this is the bitter invention Satan."
Wink by Chris Blakely is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

That is until Pope Clement VIII was pressured by some of advisers to officially declare coffee the drink of sin in 1600, or so the rumor goes. The advisers may not have thought the plan throw and it backfired a little; Clement decided he had to try the drink first to make his decision, and after a taste he supposedly said, "This devil's drink is so delicious...we should cheat the devil by baptizing it!" Fanciful at best, but I do personally like thinking my coffee has received official Papal approval.

It wasn't long after that coffee spread throughout Europe, with coffee shops becoming the new place for thinkers to gather to exchange ideas. Coffeehouses earned the nickname "penny universities" because for the price of a cup of coffee you could join in on conversations about almost anything with the educated elite. The effect was similar to when the internet first kicked off, although probably with less 12-year olds practicing their curses and all the other unsavory bits.

Who could debase anything wearing wigs like those?
The white powder prevented any and all wrongdoings, I'm sure.

"Wait, they can do what to us?"
-The Low Class, on Coffee

In fact, egalitarian ideas, shifts of power, and, slightly less fortunately, rebellion, seemed to follow coffee where ever it went. One might venture to say that coffee may have been the substance the gave people the power to fight for the rights that they deserved. Or, one could observe that the rise of coffeehouses gave people something safe to drink that wasn't alcoholic, and perhaps all the people needed to do was sober up a little and realize they were being toyed with.

Keep an eye out for the next history post, where I'll go over coffee's travel from Europe to the rest of the world.

Bigger Than Caffeine: Coffee and Rwanda

Coffee may be your morning routine. It might be the fuel that gets you going, or it may be your culinary indulgence. But what does coffee mean for the people growing it?

The first thoughts that come to mind when someone mentions Rwanda aren’t pleasant. Being the home of one of the largest genocides of this generation, it’s hard to imagine thinking of much else. But this is changing, and it’s possible that in a few decades the first thing you will think of when you think Rwanda will be coffee. Damned good coffee at that.

Made by some pretty awesome people.

Coffee has been hanging around Rwanda for a long time: small farms were forced to grow it in the Belgian colonial era of the 1930s, planting the arabica species of the coffee plant (keep that in mind). In the early 90’s coffee was the majority of exports, but the chaos decimated the coffee infrastructure, and with significantly less people to work the farms and almost no way to process the beans, the coffee industry dwindled.

Looking at the country now, it’s hard to imagine Rwanda not having world-class coffee: coffee has been a major crop for decades, the country is still filled with the heirloom arabica trees when many other countries replaced theirs with the tough-as-nails-quantity-over-quality robusta trees and the climate is about as perfect as one could hope for growing coffee.

Pictured: Coffee heaven. If you look really hard and maybe cross your eyes you’ll see angelic coffee beans playing harps.
Photo by Amakuru is licensed under CC-BY-SA-2.0

The transition from barely functioning, C-grade coffee production (read: Folger’s) to top class, “let’s sell this at $22 a pound at Starbucks and call it ‘black apron,’ whatever that means,” didn’t happen overnight. Or by accident.

“Oops, I accidentally made great coffee. It just kinda happened” -No One Ever

When President Paul Kagame stepped into office, he realized that coffee could revive the destitute economy and released control of the production back to the farmers. Then, working with US Agency for International Development, an organization named PEARL taught Rwandans better farming practices as well as how to cup coffee and control quality of their product, filling the gaps left from the genocide. 

After learning more about what they were producing, the Rwandan farmers were able to see what they were growing as a craft, not something they were forced to grow, and began to care about what they made. Stepping into the craft coffee industry also meant farmers were able to more than double their incomes. This has helped some famers immensely, but many are still trying to find ways of getting their coffee to processing stations and then to the market, meaning sometimes they have an amazing product, but no way to sell it.

The fireman carrying should be saved for firemen, and maybe adventurous honeymooners.
Photo by Hanoi Mark is licensed under CC-BY-NC 2.0

The question now is, have you tasted any of the delicious coffee from Rwanda? And if not, would you like to? You can find Rwandan coffee at many well-respected roasters across the country, but if you’re in Portland you can buy a pound of Rwandan at Arabica, with beans we source from the local Rwanda Bean Company. If you’re lucky you can stop by our Commercial St. location on July 15th for our Rwanda Benefit, you'll be able to try some of our Rwandan coffee and learn about the importance of coffee in Rwanda from the man who sources it for us.

Learn more about the event here, or see how you can help the farmers continue their craft here. And the next time you see some Rwandan coffee in a shop somewhere, remember the words of Zac Nsenga, former Rwandan ambassador to the United States: “The more you consume coffee from Rwanda, the more you give Rwanda hope. It’s the quality and the story behind it that makes it special.”

(P.S. If you’re interested in learning more about Rwanda’s history and coffee’s place in that, please read this wonderful piece in the New York Times by Laura Fraser and this interview on NPR by Michaeleen Doucleff. This blog wouldn't be possible without either of these pieces.)

Roasting, pt. 2: The Equipment and Roasting at Home

The first thing we have to think about is the equipment: what are you going to use to roast coffee? It’s true that you can roast coffee anywhere there’s heat, but I’m about as likely to try roasting coffee in a dryer as I am trying to cook a turkey in one, even if does kind of resemble the real deal.

Innovation is not always a good thing.
Picture by Damien du Toit is licensed under CC BY 2.0

A drum roaster is the most common type of roaster used in the craft coffee industry. They vary in size incredibly, from tiny, one pound tabletop test roasters to monsters that can roast a few hundred pounds of coffee at once. Generally a smaller batch means less inconsistency in the batch. They feature rotating drums that heat up to roast the coffee. They work through both convection and conduction, so some heat is transferred directly to the beans from the drum, but the air catches some of that heat, warms up, and helps roast the beans a little.

There are roasters out there that work exclusively by hot air. Some might have walked into a super market that roasts its own coffee to find something that looks like some kind of mechanical monster variety of a popcorn popper. Don’t trust those. Generally, the heating is uneven and the process automated.

Coffee is only kind of like popcorn, and this is just taking it too far.
Picture by pchow98 is licensed under CC BY NC ND 2.0

That being said, if you want to try your hand at roasting coffee at home, there are worse things you could do than trying to do it with a popcorn popper. So many people have done it by now that it’s basically a science, and some people have gone as far as adding modifications to their poppers. Even if you have an old fashioned stovetop popcorn popper you can manage some decently roasted coffee.

There are other ways if you don’t have a popcorn popper or feel like owning one. The oven is popular, preferably with a perforated pan or something else that has a lot of holes in it—like a mesh colander. You could even go back to the old days and just roast in a cast iron skillet, but be ready for smoke. Like lots of smoke. Like ninja levels of smoke.

Just train your other sense and you'll be fine. Or turn the exhaust fan on, if you want to be lame.
Picture by Martin Cathrae is licensed under CC BY SA 2.0

None of these methods are going to offer you the same quality you would get from a professional roaster. But this is more about process, adventure and bragging rights than making the best coffee in the world. So what’s stopping you? Go out, get some green beans and roast yourself some coffee.

What Happens When You Roast Coffee?

Maybe you wanted to make your own coffee, but growing is difficult and you don’t live on a mountain in the middle of Ethiopia, so you would only be able to grow poor little coffee plants. Or maybe you did grow some coffee but when you processed it you just wound up with a fermenting pile of mush. Either way, somewhere along the line you just gave up and decided to buy some green beans online. Roasting can’t be that hard, right? It’s just, what, baking?

Well, you’re in luck. Anyone with an oven or a stove, or (for the desperate folks out there, a popcorn popper, can roast coffee). Unfortunately, roasting good coffee can be tough. It’s not as simple as just tossing the beans in a heated drum and walking away.

No matter what you’re using, when you toss a bean in the heat, the beans will dry out before anything else happens. Even though some of that moisture was dealt with in the processing, there’s still a little hanging on. One surprising side effect of this is that drier coffee beans will actually roast quicker. So sometimes in the depths of our Maine winters the coffee will roast quicker, despite Jack Frost’s best attempts to cool the process down.

Once the beans are dry they will start to caramelize. That’s right, the same process that makes a decadent sweet is behind coffee’s awesomeness. Okay, maybe not so surprising. There are a lot of sugars in those green beans, but we don’t want them to just be sweet, we want them to be complex.

Coffee is not Kool-Aid
Picture by Arun Joseph is licensed under CC BY NC SA 2.0

Once the beans reach 394 degrees Fahrenheit (give or take a few) they will crack. Think popcorn. It’s an audible sound that is called first crack and is considered the point when coffee becomes drinkable, by most.

Coffee might be popcorn, kinda. Don't tell coffee I said that.
Picture by Janet Lackey is licensed under CC BY NC 2.0

If you keep the heat going until the beans reaches 437 degrees Fahrenheit (again, give or take a few—coffee is complicated), they will actually pop again. At this point, all of the sugars have been caramelized, most of the delicate flavors have been burned off, and there will be a lot of ‘darker’ flavors—think chocolate and smoke. This is also the end of a stage called pyrolysis, which began with first crack, for all of the science-y types out there.

Coffee: a more reasonable and fashionable outlet for the seasoned nerd

Picture by Andrea Allen is licensed under CC BY 2.0

A good roaster wants to balance a nice sweetness with a rich complexity. If you roast a bean too long you risk losing some of the bean’s more delicate flavors, and if you get crazy and decide to keep on going, all you will taste will be the roast. Some appreciate the darker roasts for their chocolate flavor and rich mouthfeel, but some consider dark roasts to be burnt, tasting like carbon and even plastic if the roast goes too far.

Coffee is also not plastic.
Picture by Brenda Anderson is licensed under CC BY NC SA 2.0

There’s not just the level of the roast to worry about, but also how it got there. If you don’t treat the coffee well, heat it gently and keep it constantly moving, you risk beans that are unevenly roasted. This could mean one side is burnt while the other is a nice rich brown, or that maybe the outside is just where you want it to be, but the inside is still green. The resulting coffee can taste, at the same time, burnt and vegetal, a kind of unfortunate conundrum.

Now you know the process: next time we will talk a little bit more about what roasters use on different levels, and how you might go about roasting coffee at home.

Processing, Pt. 2

So we've looked at how to get the bean out of the fruit, but once you have it, what do you do with it? The answer is not to grind and brew, or even roast. Those beans have a ways to go, and before they can even be shipped, they have to be dried to a low moisture content, because moisture, rot and bacteria are like a group of young hooligans that are always hanging out together. The beans are usually dried in beds outside, where they are shifted frequently to speed the process and prevent mold. 

(Photo by skinnydiver is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0)

The process is also done partially or entirely by machine on some farms. It is important that the process is done properly, neither too quick nor too slow. If it's down too quickly, it risks damage to the beans, while if it's done too slowly unpleasantness may set in via rot or fermentation. Either way, you get some pretty nasty coffee.

I’m not pointing any fingers or anything 
(Photo by JeepersMedia is licensed under CC BY 2.0)

After the coffee has been dried, there's still the parchment around the bean, which is removed by dry milling. Some producers delay milling and let the beans rest with the parchment intact for a few months, which increases the shelf-life of the green beans. Once the beans are milled they must be sorted by density and color to insure consistency within batches. For a roaster, this means he doesn’t have to curse because half of the batch burnt before the other half could finish. For you this means if you buy a pound of coffee it’s going to taste basically the same throughout the whole pound. This can be done by hand, using density tables, and judging color by eye, but infrared is being used more frequently throughout the world.

(Photo by sarahemcc is licensed under CC BY 2.0)

Mostly, the beans are sorted to remove any defect beans, but they can also be graded into different batches labeled by number or letter, or separated into normal coffee beans and peaberries, which are smaller, round coffee beans that are the result of a genetic defect (which isn't to say there is anything bad about them, just to say that they are different; some even hold the peaberry in higher respect than the plain ol’ bean).

Roasted peaberries up close 
(Photo by Tschi is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0)

After the beans are sorted, they are shipped to importers who distribute them, or sometimes even directly to roasters who have relationships with individual farms. The final step between these green beans and the coffee beans that most people think of is roasting, which we'll cover next post.

Processing, Pt. 1

Let's say that you decide to take everything into your own hands and grow your own coffee beans. You put in the effort of planting the trees, caring for them and waiting a few years, and finally you have some beautiful bright red coffee cherries. As proud as you are, now you must be wondering, how exactly do I turn these into coffee beans?

I bet if you just squeeze hard enough you’ll get coffee, right?
(Photo by skinnydiver is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0)

Processing, which is removing everything but the sweet bean within, is an important, and sometimes overlooked part of the journey of coffee. There are a few main ways to go about it, and slight variations on them, some of which are associated with different growing regions, but as craft coffee becomes more prevalent this is changing.

Washed coffee is by far the most common processing method. It's consistent, risk free, and produces a clean cup with more crisp and simple flavors. Think of it as the safe sedan of the coffee world. For many people, this is the only type of coffee they've tasted. In washed processing, the cherries are thrown into a machine that removes the fruit,and then the mucilage, or the sticky scraps around the bean, is removed partially by bristles and then finished by fermentation in tanks of water.  The result is a coffee with a clean mouthfeel and clear flavor.

Cherry Pulper (Photo by Coffee Management is licensed under CC BY 2.0)

On the other end of the spectrum is the natural process, which was the first method used. Because it’s simpler than the washed process, it has been common in areas that can't necessarily afford all of the equipment required for washed coffee. All that must be done is pick the ripe cherries and then place them out in the sun until they're dried, like fantastic caffeinated grapes. The coffee is hulled, and voila, naturally processed coffee! The sugars of the cherry and mucilage give coffees processed this way a sweet and rich fruity flavor (like our Brazillian Mogiana). Why is the process uncommon if it's cheap and makes a uniquely delicious cup? It's somewhat of a gamble. Even assuming the weather agrees, there's such a variation in the fermentation that happens naturally that it's guaranteed that there is going to be a lot of inconsistencies within the same batch of coffee, and (unfortunately) at least a little rotting. It's not exactly like playing Russian roulette, but it's a gamble that means decently consistent natural coffees command a high price on the market.

In between these two is semi-washed, also known honey process or pulped natural (it seems no one knows what to call it). Like washed coffee, the cherry is removed from the seed, but the mucilage is left on, so that, like natural coffee, they can be left to dry in the sun or on drying beds. They retain some of the sweetness and mouthfeel of natural coffee, but are a little more refined and a little more stable.

Too much information for you? Relax by looking at these puppies in coffee cups. Next time when we finish talking about processing.

Growing and Picking Coffee

The world’s insatiable need for coffee (or perhaps just caffeine) has to be met somehow. Last post I mentioned that coffee spread pretty quickly, but where did it go, and how much of it?

Coffee is grown in more than 60 developing countries by around 25 milling farmers. Most of those farmers are still small family businesses, but you can find large coffee plantations in the countries with higher production.

There are two types of coffee plants out there, robusta and arabica. Robusta has the benefit of being a little more, well, robust, so it can handle more temperature fluctuation and harsher climates. It has more caffeine, so why do we mostly drink arabica coffee?

Well, that too, but that’s not what I meant exactly

Beans from the Arabica plant taste better. Much better. So much that it’s harder to find a brand that will openly admit to using large amounts of robusta.

There’s also another explanation of robusta’s caffeine content. The caffeine in coffee occurs as a natural defense against getting eaten. So more caffeine might mean more of a buzz for you, but it also means more death for most other things.

Even the smaller farms will generally need some help come harvest time, and some farms also grow other crops in conjunction with coffee. Coffee plants will begin producing fruit three to five years after planting. The fruit itself takes about nine months to ripen.

Don’t worry, the coffee will be ready in about six years. A cup of water while you wait? (Photo by jakeliefer is licensed under CC BY 2.0)

The plant is harvested by hand by necessity. Coffee plants can flower multiple times throughout the year, so this means there will be a mixture of ripe and unripe berries, so pickers have to be careful not to steal from future crops. It's common for the pickers to pass though several times to pick all of the ripe cherries.

(Photo by mckaysavage is licensed under CC BY 2.0)

After the cherries are picked, the have to be processed before they’re of any use to us, a step we’ll learn about in the next few posts.

What Exactly is Coffee?

Coffee is inescapable. You can find it in McDonald's and five star restaurants, the break rooms in offices and just about every gas station around the world. It exists as a simple beverage or a borderline dessert, from whole beans or instant powder. A coffee addiction is an expectation in certain lines of life, and practical necessity for others. But despite it's constant presence in our lives, very few of us know the story of where it comes from or how it got into your cup. Our hope is to change that.

It might be surprising to you that coffee comes from a fruit, though we’re not talking apples or oranges here. 

Pictured: Not coffee
(Photo by atomicbre is licensed under CC BY 3.0)

The coffee cherry is the fruit of a shrub native to Africa and parts of Asia, requiring a mild climate, lots of rain, and if you want to make a decent cup of coffee, a high elevation. 

(Photo by Ignatio Icke is licensed under CC BY 3.0)

1. center cut             2. bean,           

3. silver skin            4. parchment  

5. pectin layer         6. pulp             

7. outer skin                    

We get coffee from the seed, which we call the coffee bean. As you can see to the right, there’s a lot going on in this humble cherry. The bean inside is surrounded by parchment, mucilage and the fruit itself. How exactly do we get the nice brown beans you know and love? It’s complicated, but we’ll get into that later.

No one really know why some humans saw a fruit and decided to take its seed, roast it, and then make a drink out of it, but there is a myth about it. Sometime around the 9th century, a goatherd in Ethiopia was watching over his animals when he noticed that they would become energized and excited after eating the fruit from a certain plant.

Some say that he then decided that he wanted in on that action and ate the fruit as well, then spread the word around to his tribe. Others say that he reported his findings to an abbot at the local monastery where it became used to stay alert during prayers.

Whatever the truth story, we know that by the middle of the 15th century it had made its appearance in Yemen, and from there it spread to the rest of the Middle East, then to Europe, and from there it spread all over the world, imperialists planting it wherever it could grow, most likely because conquering countries takes a lot of energy. It quickly became the drink of choice by everyone from American revolutionary soldiers to the Pope himself. 

This is mow much of the world runs on coffee.
(Photo by Bamse is licensed under CC BY 3.0)

Skip ahead a few centuries and most of us can't face the day without it. Good things spread quickly. Catch us next time to find more about how coffee trees go from seed to tree to bean!