Delaware City Coffee Company, Inc

Description

To develop a knowledgeable relationship with coffee you must first understand what coffee is. The coffee bean is actually a seed, or pit of the round, red "cherry" fruit of a tropical evergreen shrub. The coffee shrub can grow to 15 feet in height with thick branches and broad, waxy green leaves. In addition to the red berry clusters of coffee cherries, each coffee shrub has loads of jasmine scented flowers. A normal cherry contains two beans that grow nestled against each other. When one of these beans doesn't develop properly, the remaining bean takes over the extra space at the heart of the cherry and becomes unusually rounded. These anomalies are known as "peaberries." Because of their unique appearance, they are occasionally sorted out from the other beans and sold separately. Today, most of us consume our coffee by the cup which requires processing to free the beans from the cherry, roasting, grinding, and then brewing with filtered hot water. Earlier coffee consumers fermented the tangy coffee fruit for liquor; evidence shows others boiled the leaves for tea. Ethiopian nomads even rolled beans with animal fat to fashion a sort of traveler's quick-energy bar. Since its discovery in Arabia around the ninth century, coffee has become one of the world's most popular agricultural products. In terms of trade volume, coffee is second only to oil in worldwide trade. It is one of the most labor-intensive food products, undergoing more than 15 processing steps from the cherry...

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