There are the expert cuppers (equivalent to wine tasters) who spend their day slurping, savoring, and spitting coffee. There are the frantic traders in the pits of the coffee exchanges who gesticulate, scream, and set the price of a commodity they rarely see in its raw form. There are the exporters, importers, and roasters. The list of those who make money from coffee doesn’t stop in the producing countries. The coffee they prepare lands on breakfast tables, in offices and upscale coffee bars of the United States, Europe, Japan, and other developed countries, where cosmopolitan consumers often pay a day’s Third World wages for a cappuccino. Many live in poverty without plumbing, electricity, medical care, or nutritious foods. The vast majority of those who perform these repetitive tasks work in beautiful places, yet these laborers earn an average of $3 a day. Then the beans must be spread to dry for several days (or heated in drums), the parchment and silver skin removed, and the resulting green beans bagged for shipment, roasting, grinding, and brewing around the world. Laborers regulate the complicated process of removing the precious bean from its covering of pulp and mucilage. Calloused palms plant the seeds, nurse the seedlings under a shade canopy, transplant them to mountainside ranks, prune and fertilize, spray for pests, irrigate, harvest, and lug two hundred–pound bags of coffee cherries.

It is an incredibly labor-intensive crop. At various times it has been prescribed as an aphrodisiac, enema, nerve tonic, and life extender.Ĭoffee provides a livelihood (of sorts) for some 100 million human beings. In the form of a hot infusion of its ground, roasted seeds, coffee is consumed for its bittersweet bouquet, its mind-racing jump start, and social bonding. From its original African home, coffee propagation has spread in a girdle around the globe, taking over whole plains and mountainsides between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Yet coffee is big business, one of the world’s most valuable agricultural commodities, providing the largest jolt of the world’s most widely taken psychoactive drug. The evergreen leaves form glossy ovals and, like the seeds, are laced with caffeine.

It first grew on a shrub-or small tree, depending on your perspective or height-under the Ethiopian rain forest canopy, high on the mountainsides. It is only a berry, encasing a double-sided seed. trifle away their time, scald their Chops, and spend their Money, all for a little base, black, thick, nasty bitter stinking, nauseous Puddle water? “In Praise of Coffee,” Arabic poem (1511) This is the beverage of the friends of God. O Coffee! Thou dost dispel all care, thou are the object of desire to the scholar.

Uncommon grounds the history of coffee