Industrial Processing of Green Coffee Beans

Industrial processing of Green Coffee Beans
Four methods of industrial processing of green coffee beans are used:

*Roasting, an essential process to develop coffee’s aromatic properties

*Grinding

*Percolation followed by dehydration to obtain soluble coffee

*Decaffeination


Prior to processing, green coffee beans are clean and dusted by pneumatic machines, then stored in a partitioned.
Industrial processing of Green Coffee Beans

Caffé Mocha

Caffé Mocha
The term “mocha” originally referred to coffee that was grown in the Arabian Peninsula and shipped from the Yemeni port of Mocha.

The history of this word’s use is fairly muddled.

It is likely that most European tasted coffee before chocolate.

Therefore, when chocolate first appeared from Western Hemisphere, they found it reminiscent of, or confused it with, the wild and fruity flavors of Yemeni coffee.

As sixteenth century sailing ships carried goods from the Arabian Peninsula across the Mediterranean the Italian port of Venice became coffee’s gateway to European markets.

Merchants in Venice and Turin opened the earliest coffee houses, and when Spanish drinking chocolate was first introduced to Turin, it was mixed with coffee and cream into a stimulating novelty called bavareisa.

In Italy, confectioners from the “Sweet Piemonte” region develop the art of combining these culinary treasures, culminating with bicerin (meaning small glass).

Outside Italy, caffé latte has become the basis for a drink of one third espresso and two thirds steamed milk.

The ubiquitous caffé mocha, a latte with the addition of chocolate powder or chocolate syrup, only hints at the possibilities of more complex combinations.

Since then, the word “mocha” has come to mean many things, including the flavor combination of coffee and chocolate, while it s still used to describe coffee from Yemen (or even coffee from Ethiopia that tastes like coffee from Yemen).

Caffé mocha is made by mixing chocolate (either sweetened, ground chocolate or chocolate syrup) with espresso.

Steamed milk is then added to the mixture.

Most recipes specifically suggest that the espresso and chocolate be mixed before the steamed milk is added, in order to preserve the proper consistency and texture of the milk and to ensure that the mocha has a frothy, rich texture.

As with the latte, the quality and taste of the espresso matter a great deal.
Caffé Mocha

Spread of coffee consumption throughout Europe

Spread of coffee consumption throughout Europe
Coffee consumption rapidly spread to the French-speaking cantons of Switzerland and then to the rests of that country after taking hold of France.

Cafés were extremely successful in Italy during the 18th century. There were for example, 206 cafés in Venice (where the first coffee house in Europe is said to have opened in 1645), 40 in Padua, and many others in Rome, Florence, Turin and Naples.

At that time, the Italians were already drinking concentrated and very sweet coffee, “caffe ristretto”.

In Venice, the first big cafes at the end of the 17th century were the Florian and the Quadri in Saint-Mark’s Square.

Starting around 1700, Austria and the Scandinavia countries became big customers of coffee.

The first two Swedish coffeehouses were opened in Stockholm in 1690. In 1671, Fauste Nauron of Syria, a Maronite and professor of Oriental languages in Rome, wrote in Latin the first treatise in coffee.

Cultivation of coffee trees outside of the Middle East began only at the start of the 17th century.

Dutch merchants imported the first coffee plant into Holland from Mocha in 1616.

The coffee trees were cultivated in Ceylon in 1658 and in Java in 1696. The plants of Coffea Arabica imported from Arabia were destroyed by a flood but the cuttings imported in 1699 from Malabar into Java were the origin for all the coffee trees of the East Indies as well as those of the botanical gardens of Amsterdam; from there they were eventually exported to most of the botanical gardens of Europe.

A first but unsuccessfully planting took place in Dijon in 1670. In 1713, new attempts at transplanting coffee trees from Amsterdam to Paris were once again failures.

In 1714, the burgomaster of Amsterdam offered several coffee tree plants to King Louis XIV who entrusted them to Antoine de Jussieu, director of the botanical gardens.

These plants were the ancestor of coffee plants of the former French colonies and of part of Latin America.
Spread of coffee consumption throughout Europe

Green Coffee Processing: Dry Method

Green Coffee Processing: Dry Method
Ideally in this process the coffee berries should be uniformly ripened, but often in practice they are harvested by stripping all the berries at once from the trees and collecting them on the ground beneath.

The berries are gathered from the ground and spread out in the sun where they are raked so that they are evenly exposed.

Initially the microorganisms and the enzymes inherent in the coffee berry after the pulp and mucilage. Then the red skin, pulp, mucilage and parchment fuse to produce a thick hull as they dry out.

The coffee is called “pergamino” at this stage.

This hull is removed in a hulling machine that simultaneously polishes off most of the silverskin layer.

Both Arabica and Robusta coffees can be processed in this way, but an additional step is necessary for the Robusta beans which have a particularly tough silverskin.

Before the tough silverskin can be removed, the beans must be soaked in water. The moistened silverskin can then be removed mechanically and the beans are dried again before storage and shipping.

The dry method produces green coffee beans much less expensively than the wet method. A high proportion of Brazilian Arabica coffee is processed in this way and almost all Robusta coffees are treated in this way.

The final beverage produced from dry processed coffee has a full flavor that is often described as hard and sometimes is characteristic of a region, for example Rio coffees.

The dry method is generally the less controlled of the two main methods. The stages where extra care could be introduced after harvesting are where the coffee berries may be washed and sorted by flotation before being dried and during then drying itself.

The risk of fungal damage to the berries and consequently to the beans is vey high if the berries are too heaped.

They need to be spread out very thinly, to be frequently raked and not resoaked by rainfall.
Green Coffee Processing: Dry Method