Coffee Regions

Your coffee has been on a long journey before finding its way to you. Many people have been involved in the production of the coffee beans. You are the last and most important person in this production line before the coffee is served to your customer.

All coffee grows in a band between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. There are 70 coffee growing countries, the most widely known are shown in the map below including Brazil, accounting for 33% of the World’s annual harvest and Ethiopia, where coffee was first discovered, as rumour has it by “Kaldi” a goat herder!

The Steps to Coffee

Harvesting - Cherries ripen between 6- 9 months and change from green to red when they are ready to pick. Some countries pick mechanically after which the cherries need to be sorted and separated from twigs etc. In other countries only the ripe cherries are picked by hand. Typically, a farm hand would pick up to 100kgs and in Colombia a good day’s wage is the equivalent of £15 per day.

Drying the beans - After processing, the beans are still covered in a fine skin called “parchment” which is similar to that on roasted peanuts. The parchment is dried in the sunshine, or by mechanical driers to retain approximately 11% moisture in the beans, dry enough for them to be stored without damage. The drying takes between 1-2 weeks.

Hulling - The process of Hulling removes the dried “parchment” (now called “Hull”) from Wet processed beans and the dried-up pulp (now called “husk”) from Dry processed beans.

Roasting - The green beans are roasted at temperatures between 200-250oC for 10-20 minutes during which they lose 15-20% of their weight. Café du Monde beans are specially roasted in a “fluid Bed” roaster – one of only four in the UK. This convection turbo roasting provides us with evenly roasted beans which have a very high extraction quality. Once roasted our espresso beans are packed in 1kg foil bags fitted with a one-way valve to allow the beans to breath and to guarantee their freshness.

Decaffeinated Coffee - green beans are decaffeinated prior to roasting, by one of three methods: -

Traditional - the beans are soaked in water including organic solvents to dissolve the caffeine.

CO2 - the beans are placed in a chamber of liquid CO2 which absorbs and removes the caffeine. 

Swiss Water Method - the beans are flushed by pure mountain water through charcoal filters which collect the caffeine. Mostly produced in Canada, this is the most eco-friendly method of decaffeinating but is also the most expensive. In the UK approximately 5% of coffee consumed is decaffeinated.