Coffee Producing

The process of producing coffee - converting the raw fruit of the coffee plant into the finished coffee, varies, significantly affecting the flavour of the roasted and brewed coffee.

Image right - "The London Coffee-stall", from Henry Mayhew's "London Labour and the London Poor", 1851. Public Domain Free CC0 image for Personal and Business use.

• Planting: Coffee seeds are planted in shaded beds and then moved to individual pots.
• Growing: Coffee plants need specific conditions to thrive, such as consistent rainfall, mild temperatures, and well-drained soil. They typically grow at higher altitudes, between 2,000 and 6,000 feet above sea level.
• Harvesting: The cherries, which contain the coffee beans, are picked by hand when they turn red.
• Processing: The cherries are processed to remove the pulp and parchment and extract the green beans. There are several methods for processing, including the dry, wet, and semi-washed processes.
• Drying: The beans are dried to a moisture content of around 11%.
• Milling

• Roasting: The green coffee is roasted to create the aromatic brown beans.

• Grinding: The beans are ground to extract the most flavour.
• Brewing: The ground coffee is brewed in boiling water.

Occupations

Barista
Coffee House Manager
Coffee House/Shop Keeper
Coffe Stall holder
Coffee Roaster

History

Coffee grown worldwide can be traced back centuries to the ancient coffee forests on the Ethiopian plateau. There, legend says the goat herder Kaldi first discovered the potential of these beloved beans.

Coffee cultivation and trade began on the Arabian Peninsula. By the 15th century, coffee was being grown in the Yemeni district of Arabia and by the 16th century it was known in Persia, Egypt, Syria, and Turkey.

Coffee was first introduced to Europe in Hungary when the Turks invaded Hungary at the Battle of Mohács in 1526.

Americas

In 1714, the Mayor of Amsterdam presented a gift of a young coffee plant to King Louis XIV of France. The King ordered it to be planted in the Royal Botanical Garden in Paris. Gabriel de Clieu took coffee seedlings to Martinique in the Caribbean in 1720/23. Those sprouts flourished and 50 years later there were 18,680 coffee trees in Martinique enabling the spread of coffee cultivation to Saint-Domingue (Haiti), Mexico and other islands of the Caribbean. The French territory of Saint-Domingue saw coffee cultivated starting in 1734, and by 1788 supplied half the world's coffee. The French colonial plantations relied heavily on African slave labourers. However, the dreadful conditions that the slaves worked in on coffee plantations were a factor in the soon-to-follow Haitian Revolution. The coffee industry never fully recovered there.

In the mid-1600's, coffee was brought to New Amsterdam, later New York by the British. Though coffee houses rapidly began to appear, tea continued to be the favoured drink in the New World until 1773, when the colonists revolted against a heavy tax on tea imposed by King George III. The revolt, known as the Boston Tea Party, would forever change the American drinking preference to coffee.

Britain

Coffee was introduced into England about 1650.

Image right - A 19th-century drawing of Lloyd's Coffee House - By Anonymous - Public Domain, Wiki Commons

The first coffeehouse in England was opened in St. Michael's Alley in Cornhill, London, owned by Pasqua Rosée, the servant of Daniel Edwards, a trader in Turkish goods. Edwards imported the coffee and assisted Rosée in setting up the establishment.

Coffee was also brought in through the British East India Company and the Dutch East India Company in the 17th century. Oxford's Queen's Lane Coffee House, established in 1654, is still in existence today.

By 1675, there were more than 3,000 coffeehouses throughout England. There were many disruptions in the progressive movement of coffeehouses between the 1660s and 1670s. During the enlightenment, these early English coffee houses became gathering places used for deep religious and political discussions. This practice became so common, and potentially subversive, that Charles II made an attempt to crush coffee houses in 1670s.

The first large-scale coffee roaster in the United Kingdom was patented in 1824; the social investigator and journalist Henry Mayhew noted that even in the 1830s, selling tea and coffee in the streets was little known, and it was only in the early 1840s that coffee consumption increased, helped by a reduction in duty on it. By 1851, when Mayhew published his study into London life and work, there were four coffee stalls in Covent Garden. These coffee stall keepers bought their coffee beans from a grocer, and would grind it themselves, mixing (or adulterating) it with chicory and burnt sugar to make it last. Mayhew stressed that coffee – usually costing around a penny a mug to the customer – was far more popular than tea, and ‘scarcely one stall in a hundred’ would sell the latter.

References

• Coffee Production WIKI
• Coffee Roasting WIKI
• History of Ciffee WIKI
• https://www.lloyds.com/about-lloyds/history/important-people-from-o...

People

Robert Gatenby and his sons
Edward Lloyd (1648 – 1713) came to London, it’s thought, from Canterbury, arriving with his wife Abigail in about 1680 at the age of 32. Their eldest son Edward had just died, and their third daughter Mary had just been born.