Secrets to Great Coffee
Someone once told me you can taste the world in a great cup of coffee. I never really thought much about it until I was standing in a coffee field in Costa Rica. Though the country makes up less than one percent of the world's total production, coffee has been a staple in the country for the last two-hundred years and remains an important export today. Costa Ricans know coffee, from bean to brewing; or as Mario Andres, the son of a Monteverde coffee producer, told me "In Costa Rica, you do something then you have coffee."
read more closeBut in order to get to the bottom of a great cup of coffee you have to start at its roots.
Beans: Arabica vs. Robusta
The best coffee in the world comes from Arabica beans. These are the aromatic high-quality beans that require a little more delicacy to care for than their Robusta counterparts. Most of the world's Arabica beans are grown 20 degrees north and south of the equator. They require higher altitudes and more water than Robusta beans. On the other hand, Robusta beans are more resilient, have higher caffeine content and are usually grown in larger quantities to make up for the lower quality and price per beans.
Berries
Coffee berries take nearly nine months to ripen, starting as a small, hard green pod growing into a juicy, red berry that tastes nothing at all like coffee. Roughly 90 percent of all coffee berries produce two coffee beans, but the very best only produce one. These special beans, known as pea berries, contain the higher concentrations of caffeine oils and flavors than the two-bean berries. As a result, pea berries are often sorted from the rest of the beans to make premium coffee.
Sun Drying
The key to concentrating the flavors of coffee beans lies in the drying process. The goal is to take out the extra moisture leftover from the berry and the sifting process leaving behind only the 12 percent of moisture essential to the flavor of the bean. Larger producers often use convection ovens to speed up the drying process to a mere 15 hours, but this can lessen the quality and reduces flavor by incidentally extracting some of the caffeine oils. Patience is key to great coffee. Many Costa Rican producers sun dry their coffee beans for around six days to condense their flavors before aging them for three additional months.
Roasting
Roasting unlocks the coffee's flavor expanding the bean and extracting the caffeine oils. There's a common misconception that dark roast coffee has more caffeine, but actually the opposite is true. Lighter roast retains more caffeine oils while darker roast produces more flavors – though roasters debate whether the amount of caffeine lost in dark roasting makes a noticeable difference in caffeine content. Coffee flavor is the result of toasting the bean (much as you would toast), giving it the bold and acidic notes that people ordinarily associate with strong coffee.
Brewing
Before you go tossing all this carefully crafted, coffee into a paper filter to brew your morning cup of coffee consider this: what happens to the oil in a piping hot paper bag full of french fries? The grease soaks into the paper, right? Well, the same thing happens when you brew coffee in a paper filter; it absorbs all the natural caffeine oils that ordinarily make a great cup of coffee. That's why Costa Ricans brew their coffee with traditional cotton filters; it gets more of the essential oils into each cup of coffee.
Now, imagine a mechanic wants to clean the grease off his cotton shirt after a hard day of work? Does he use lukewarm water, or hot water to extract the oil? Most coffee makers heat the water only enough to evaporate. As the water cools it drips into the coffee grounds and ends up in the pot where it's re-heated. This process adds an unnatural bitter flavor, and again, prevents essential oils from making it into the cup of coffee.
So how do you brew a great cup of coffee? Well Costa Ricans have been doing it for roughly two hundred years. They use a small wooden device called a chorreador. It's essentially just a few pieces of wood holding up a cotton filter with room enough underneath for a single cup of coffee. Coffee grounds are placed in the filter and boiling hot water is slowly poured in through the top, to brew a single cup of coffee. When you look on top you'll see a colorful sheen floating on top, these are all the finely crafted caffeine oils that give a great cup of coffee its aroma and flavor.
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