<![CDATA[Reddy to Brew

<![CDATA[Reddy to Brew - Blog]]>Mon, 26 Dec 2022 03:07:52 -0800Weebly<![CDATA[How to Cup Coffee Like a Pro]]>Sat, 08 Aug 2015 06:12:15 GMThttp://www.reddytobrew.com/blog/how-to-cup-coffee-like-a-pro

What is cupping?
Coffee cupping is the process to evaluate coffee's taste, the first step in your development as a coffee aficionado. Have you ever seen a wine taster swirling a vintage Cabernet in a glass and sniffing it before taking tiny sips? Cupping is the coffee world's equivalent.

Here's how you do it.

Cupping stimulates the taste buds and envelops the palate, allowing you to experience the full, raw flavor of the coffee bean itself. Classic cupping usually involves small coffee glasses (similar to shot glasses). Many coffee shops and roasters offer cupping classes or shows. Both shops and roasters have specialists who devote a large portion of their time cupping, tasting different producers and regions. Cupping helps specialists determine the best methods for brewing particular coffees, creating variables in water temperature, steeping times, grind sizes, et cetera.

Step 1

Acquire one cupping glass per participant (preferably 6 oz. glasses).

Step 2

Grind for two tablespoons of freshly roasted beans per glass.

Step 3

Do a preliminary aroma test; breathe in deeply with nose above the cup. Log detected flavors and fragrances.

Step 4

Slowly pour boiling water soaking all the grounds, filling 6 ounces to the brim. Ideal water temperature: 202 degrees F

Step 5

Wait 3-4 minutes for the steeping process to take place; if everything goes well, the grounds should settle at the top and form a thin crust layer with a deep, bubbling coffee brown color accompanying a light bloom.

Step 6

Breaking the crust is one of the essential parts of cupping coffee; get up close and make sure to capture all the trapped fragrances while they last. Using a spoon, slowly break the crust of grounds; smell the released aromas carefully, taking note of all unique noticed flavors and fragrances. Log notes while you cup.

Step 7

Now comes the most important part of coffee cupping: tasting. Slurp spoonfuls of the mixture loudly for the best results (you will often hear this in coffee shops and roasteries). Some enthusiasts spit out the grounds after tasting to avoid over-caffeination. Continue to slurp while breathing gently. The goal is to envelop the palate with the grounds to ensure maximum flavor absorption. Log notes while cuppping; tasting the coffee tends to extract the most flavor.

A note from the roastmaster

If cupping different coffee samples, wash your mouth with sparkling water between cuppings.
Keep a logbook of each cupping you do; I've seen coffee experts with more than 40 years of cupping logbooks.
Measure water temperature with a meat thermometer or other device; maintaining around 202 degrees Fahrenheit is key to the overall steeping process of cupping.

]]><![CDATA[A Guide to Coffee Pairings]]>Sat, 08 Aug 2015 04:09:49 GMThttp://www.reddytobrew.com/blog/a-guide-to-coffee-pairings"Foodies and baristas are starting to pay attention to how the flavors in coffee complement dessert and pastry choices. Unlike wine pairings, though, there are no hard and fast rules for pairing coffee with food. There are, however, some guidelines to help you choose the perfect coffee to pair with your favorite desserts. (Coffee Kind)"

The basic theory of coffee pairing is a simple one. Read more

]]><![CDATA[Coffee Production: Where is your coffee from?]]>Wed, 06 May 2015 05:56:58 GMThttp://www.reddytobrew.com/blog/coffee-production-where-is-your-coffee-from

After arriving from French Guiana in the early 18th century, coffee quickly spread and thrived in Brazil. Today Brazil is responsible for about a third of all coffee production, making it by far the heavyweight champion of the coffee-producing world. Though many connoisseurs believe that Brazil’s emphasis on quantity takes a toll on quality, many also praise the country’s finer varieties. Brazil is the only high-volume producer subject to frost. The devastating 1975 frost, in particular, was a boon to other coffee-growing countries. Two 1994 frosts raised prices worldwide.

Popular Varietals: Mundo Novo, Caturra, Catuai, Maragojipe, Santos, Bahia

2. Vietnam (27.5 million bags)
French missionaries first brought coffee to Vietnam in the mid-1860s, but production remained negligible as late as 1980. In the 1990s, however, Vietnamese coffee production has been ratcheted up at a furious pace. At least one trader worries that the industry is growing too quickly for its own good. “The crop’s growing so fast that there’s not an equivalent growth in processing, so you’re looking at quality problems,” he said from Daklak, Vietnam’s main coffee-growing region.
Popular Varietals: Robusta (world's largest producer)

3. Colombia (11.6 million bags)
Colombia is the only South American country with both Atlantic and Pacific ports—an invaluable aid to shipping. The crop’s economic importance is such that all cars entering Colombia are sprayed for harmful bacteria. Colombia’s coffee grows in the moist, temperate foothills of the Andes, where the combination of high altitude and moist climate makes for an especially mild cup.
Popular Varietals: Mendellin, Colombian, Supremo, Bogota

4. Indonesia (6.85 million bags)
The Dutch unwittingly gave coffee a nickname in the late 17th century, when they began the first successful European coffee plantation on their island colony of Java (now part of Indonesia). Top-grade arabicas are still produced on Java as well as on Sumatra, Sulawesi, and Flores, but the Indonesian archipelago is most notable as the world’s largest producer of Robusta beans.
Popular Varietals: Java, Sumatra S795, Mandheling, Lintong

5. Ethiopia (6.5 million bags)
The natural home of the arabica tree and the setting for most of coffee’sorigin legends, Ethiopia is Africa’s top arabica exporter and leads the continent in domestic consumption. About 12 million Ethiopians make their living from coffee, whose name is said to be a derivation of “Kaffa,” the name of an Ethiopian province.
Popular Varietals: Harrar, Sidamo, Yirgacheffe

6. India (5 million bags)
According to legend, India is the birthplace of coffee cultivation east of Arabia. Today coffee production is under the strict control of the Indian Coffee Board, which some say reduces economic incentive and thereby lowers quality.
Popular Varietals: Mysore, Monsooned Malabar, Sarchimor

7. Mexico (4.5 million bags)
Coffee came to Mexico from Antilles at the end of the 18th century, but was not exported in great quantities until the 1870s. Today approximately 100,000 small farms generate most Mexican coffee, and most of the beans come from the south. Mexico is the largest source of U.S. coffee imports.
Popular Varietals: Altura, Liquidambar MS, Pluma Coixtepec/Hidalgo

8. Guatemala (4 million bags)
German immigrants initiated serious coffee cultivation in Guatemala in the 19th century. Today the country’s high-grown beans, particularly those grown on the southern volcanic slopes, are among the world’s best.
Popular Varietals: Atitlan, Pache Comom

9. Peru (3.5 million bags)
Coffee production came to Peru in the 1700s. After two centuries, the heirloom typica variety still comprises 60% of the country's exports. There are more than 110,000 coffee growers in Peru, most of whom are indigenous to these landscapes and speak Spanish as a second language. The average land-holding farmer lives on two or three hectares, hours away from the comforts of electricity and running water. Peru’s coffee exports account for two percent of both the national economy and the global coffee supply, Peru is quickly building a global reputation for producing traditionally cultivated, shade grown, high quality Arabica beans.
Popular Varietals: Gesha/Geisha, Pache Comom

10. Honduras (2.7 million bags)
Honduras is the second largest coffee producer in Central America (after Guatemala). Over a million Hondurans work in the coffee industry, representing 22% of rural employment. Hurricane Mitch fairly destroyed the infrastructure of Honduras, leaving much of the 1998 coffee crop unharvested. But the tragedy allowed Honduran farmers to reinvent their coffee for the specialty coffee scene in recent years, improving their crop quality & utilizing specialty, organic & fair trade premiums. Now Honduran coffee shines among the best in the industry.
Popular Varietals: Miramundo

Ref. 1999 National Geographic Society

]]><![CDATA[The History of Coffee]]>Fri, 01 May 2015 18:56:02 GMThttp://www.reddytobrew.com/blog/the-history-of-coffee

The global spread of coffee growing and drinking began in the Horn of Africa, where, according to legend, coffee trees originated in the Ethiopian province of Kaffa. It is recorded that the fruit of the plant, known as coffee cherries, was eaten by slaves taken from present day Sudan into Yemen and Arabia through the great port of its day, Mocha. Coffee was certainly being cultivated in Yemen by the 15th century and probably much earlier. In an attempt to prevent its cultivation elsewhere, the Arabs imposed a ban on the export of fertile coffee beans, a restriction that was eventually circumvented in 1616 by the Dutch, who brought live coffee plants back to the Netherlands to be grown in greenhouses.

Initially, the authorities in Yemen actively encouraged coffee drinking. The first coffeehouses or kaveh kanes opened in Mecca and quickly spread throughout the Arab world, thriving as places where chess was played, gossip was exchanged and singing, dancing and music were enjoyed. Nothing quite like this had existed before: a place where social and business life could be conducted in comfortable surroundings and where – for the price of a cup of coffee – anyone could venture. Perhaps predictably, the Arabian coffeehouse soon became a centre of political activity and was suppressed. Over the next few decades coffee and coffeehouses were banned numerous times but kept reappearing until eventually an acceptable way out was found when a tax was introduced on both.

By the late 1600s the Dutch were growing coffee at Malabar in India and in 1699 took some plants to Batavia in Java, in what is now Indonesia. Within a few years the Dutch colonies had become the main suppliers of coffee to Europe, where coffee had first been brought by Venetian traders in 1615. This was a period when the two other globally significant hot beverages also appeared in Europe. Hot chocolate was the first, brought by the Spanish from the Americas to Spain in 1528; and tea, which was first sold in Europe in 1610. At first coffee was mainly sold by lemonade vendors and was believed to have medicinal qualities. The first European coffeehouse opened in Venice in 1683, with the most famous, Caffe Florian in Piazza San Marco, opening in 1720. It is still open for business today. The largest insurance market in the world, Lloyd’s of London, began life as a coffeehouse. It was started in 1688 by Edward Lloyd, who prepared lists of the ships that his customers had insured.

The first literary reference to coffee being drunk in North America is from 1668 and, soon after, coffee houses were established in New York, Philadelphia, Boston and other towns. The Boston Tea Party Of 1773 was planned in a coffee house, the Green Dragon. Both the New York Stock Exchange and the Bank of New York started in coffeehouses in what is today known as Wall Street.

In 1720 a French naval officer named Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu, while on leave in Paris from his post in Martinique, acquired a coffee tree with the intention of taking it with him on the return voyage. With the plant secured in a glass case on deck to keep it warm and prevent damage from salt water, the journey proved eventful. As recorded in de Clieu’s own journal, the ship was threatened by Tunisian pirates. There was a violent storm, during which the plant had to be tied down. A jealous fellow officer tried to sabotage the plant, resulting in a branch being torn off. When the ship was becalmed and drinking water rationed, De Clieu ensured the plant’s survival by giving it most of his precious water. Finally, the ship arrived in Martinique and the coffee tree was re-planted at Preebear. It grew, and multiplied, and by 1726 the first harvest was ready. It is recorded that, by 1777, there were between 18 and 19 million coffee trees on Martinique, and the model for a new cash crop that could be grown in the New World was in place.

But it was the Dutch who first started the spread of the coffee plant in Central and South America, where today it reigns supreme as the main continental cash crop. Coffee first arrived in the Dutch colony of Surinam in 1718, to be followed by plantations in French Guyana and the first of many in Brazil in the state of Pará. In 1730 the British introduced coffee to Jamaica, where today the most famous and expensive coffee in the world is grown in the Blue Mountains.

The 17th and 18th centuries saw the establishment across Brazil of vast sugar plantations or fazendas, owned by the country’s elite. As sugar prices weakened in the 1820’s, capital and labour migrated to the southeast in response to the expansion of coffee growing in the Paraiba Valley, where it had been introduced in 1774. By the beginning of the 1830’s Brazil was the world’s largest producer with some 600,000 bags a year, followed by Cuba, Java and Haiti, each with annual production of 350 to 450,000 bags. World production amounted to some 2.5 million bags per year.

The rapid expansion of production in Brazil and Java, among others, caused a significant decline in world prices. These bottomed out in the late 1840’s, from which point a strong upward movement occurred, reaching its peak in the 1890’s. During this latter period, due mainly to a lack of inland transport and manpower, Brazilian expansion slowed considerably. Meanwhile, the upward movement of prices encouraged the growth of coffee cultivation in other producing regions in the Americas such as Guatemala, Mexico, El Salvador and Colombia.

In Colombia, where coffee had been introduced by the Jesuits as early as 1723, civil strife and the inaccessibility of the best coffee-growing regions had hampered the growth of a coffee industry. Following the “Thousand Days War” of 1899 to 1903, the new peace saw Colombians turn to coffee as their salvation. While larger plantations, or haciendas, dominated the upper Magdalena river regions of Cundinamarca and Tolima, determined peasants staked new claims in the mountainous regions to the west, in Antioquia and Caldas. New railways, relying on coffee for profit, allowed more coffee to be grown and transported. The opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 permitted exports from Colombia’s previously unreachable Pacific coast, with the port of Buenaventura assuming increasing importance.

In 1905 Colombia exported five hundred thousand bags of coffee; by 1915 exports had doubled. While Brazil desperately tried to control its overproduction, Colombian coffee became increasingly popular with American and European consumers. In 1914 Brazil supplied three-quarters of U.S. imports with 5.6 million bags, but by 1919 that figure had fallen to 4.3 million, while Colombia’s share had risen from 687,000 to 915,000 bags. During the same period Central American exports to the U.S. had risen from 302,000 to 1.2 million bags.

In spite of political turmoil, social upheaval and economic vicissitude, the 20th century saw an essentially continuous rise in demand for coffee. U.S. consumption continued to grow reaching a peak in 1946, when annual per capita consumption was 19.8 pounds, twice the figure in 1900. Especially during periods of high global prices, this steadily increasing demand lead to an expansion in production throughout the coffee-growing regions of the world. With the process of decolonization that began in the years following the Second World War, many newly independent nations in Africa, notably Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda and Burundi, found themselves in varying degrees dependent on coffee export revenue.

For US coffee drinkers, the country’s wettest city, Seattle, has become synonymous with a new type of café culture, which, from its birth in the 1970s, swept the continent, dramatically improving the general quality of the beverage. This new-found “evangelism” for coffee has spread to the rest of the world, even to countries with great coffee traditions of their own, such as Italy, Germany, and Scandinavia, adding new converts to the pleasures of good coffee. Today it is possible to find good coffee in every major city of the world, from London to Sydney to Tokyo; we are drinking more and, more importantly, better coffee.

The importance of coffee to the world economy cannot be overstated. It is one of the most valuable primary products in world trade, in many years second in value only to oil as a source of foreign exchange to producing countries. Its cultivation, processing, trading, transportation and marketing provide employment for hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Coffee is crucial to the economies and politics of many developing countries; for many of the world’s Least Developed Countries, exports of coffee account for more than 50 percent of their foreign exchange earnings. Coffee is a traded commodity on major futures and commodity exchanges, most importantly in London and New York.

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