Where does your coffee come from?
Have you ever asked “where does my coffee come from? And how did it get here”? Okay, you very well may never have asked that, but if you’re reading this then you might be slightly curious.
Did you know that by the time you are sipping on your delicious cup of morning joe, that coffee has most likely been through more than a year’s worth of hard work?!?! That’s right – your coffee has traveled a very long way for your enjoyment and all at the hands of hard-working and dedicated farmers, producers, traders, shippers, roasters and baristas. (pssst….don’t worry, it’s completely understandable if you only thought about that barista who is preparing your coffee beverage, or even if you thought your espresso came from Italy).
Often, your coffee provider does not know or does not want you to know where their coffee comes from. Have you ever looked at a big container of coffee off the grocery store shelf and tried to see where the coffee is from yet couldn’t find the source? Have you ever had a tasty coffee drink from your local café and asked your barista where the coffee is from or how it was produced yet they couldn’t answer your question?
We need our coffee. We take it for granted. What if we cared as much about where our coffee came from and how it was produced as we did about where our fruits and vegetables came from and how they were sourced? What about the meats we buy at the store or order at a restaurant? Even more importantly, what about the foods and other products we buy for our children? Well, the average American consumes more coffee in a single day – about 2-3 cups – than almost any other product. So, wouldn’t it stand to reason that we should be interested in and informed about where our coffee comes from, how it’s produced and what is in that cup of coffee we drink every morning?
We think so, which is a big reason why we started Nilaa Coffee. We have three main goals: (1) to source, buy, roast and bring you excellent coffee that you will enjoy, (2) to bring you unique coffees from regions that you do not typically see from your local coffee company, and (3) to make that connection between you and your coffee. How do we do that? By being as transparent as possible about where we source our coffee from, who makes it, who processes it, who ships it, and who roasts it (that’s us!). So, here is the lifecycle of one of our coffees as it makes it’s way from being a seed in a pot to that delicious beverage in your cup.
Seedling (Spring 2014)
Your coffee bean, that oval-looking brown thing you always see…well it’s actually a seed. A farmer will plant a coffee seed just like he would a tomato seed or a pumpkin seed or a basil seed. That will seed will germinate and slowly grow into a small coffee plant. A typical baby plant will live in a nursery for about a year so it can be in a safer, more controlled environment while it grows and strengthens.
Planting and Care (Spring 2015)
Once that baby plant is ready to live on it’s own, the farmer will transport it to the field where it will be planted to grow naturally – to absorb nutrients from the soil and water from the rain. A typical coffee plant will now need another 2-3 years before it can start producing fruit that can be harvested and produced. Farmers will monitor and prune all their plants to ensure they are healthy, growing evenly, and receiving enough water and nutrients. They will also make sure that the plants are not falling victim to pests, diseases and other problems.
Growing Season (April – November 2017)
The beautiful white flowers that blossom from all over the coffee plant symbolize the beginning of each year’s growing season. Soon after bloom, the buds will begin to grow from each node giving way to slowly growing and ripening coffee cherries. These cherries won’t look like much at the start: they will be small and green. As they ripen over the course of the season, the cherries will grow larger, develop more sugars and acids, and their skins will turn a beautiful deep red (or yellow in the case of some varietals).
Harvest (December 2017 – February 2018)
At the end of the growing season, once the coffee cherries have ripened to a beautiful red color and they have developed the right amount of sugar, it is time to harvest. And boy is this a lot of work. Most farms require dozens of extra workers during harvest season just to pick cherries, and each person typically picks up to 50kg or more of ripe coffee cherries per day (that’s more than 110 lbs per day or almost 15 lbs per hour!).
Processing (January – March/April 2018)
Drying
Once picked, the cherries have to be quickly transported to a mill where they will be processed. What does that mean? It means that the seed/bean itself (which lies inside the skin and other protective layers) must be dried. There are three main ways in which coffee is typically processed:
Sundried / Natural Process: Coffees that are naturally processed are taken right from the plant and laid out to dry for a certain amount of time. The cherries will ideally dry on raised beds or concrete patios, and this process will take 2-3 weeks to complete. After such time, the skins of the cherries will be removed.
Washed Process: Here, the outer skin (or pulp) is immediately removed from the fruit. Next, the coffee is washed in water to remove the other protective layers (or mucilage) that lay on top of the bean itself. After washing, the beans are set to dry on raised beds or patios until they reach desired dryness levels.
Honey / Pulped Natural Process: This process is a bit of a hybrid of the first two. Typically, the producer will remove the outer skin layer from the fruit, leaving all the other protective layers and mucilage in place. The fruit is then dried on beds or patios with the excess sugar from those layers remaining.
Parchment and Hulling
Regardless of which process the coffee undergoes, they will all have one more protective layer called parchment still attached to the bean. The coffee will remain in its protective parchment shell for up to a few months until it is ready to be hulled and packaged. Hulling is where the final parchment layer is removed to prepare the coffee for shipment. During this period, the coffee will patiently sit and relax in a dry mill as it awaits to be hulled and packed.
Packaging (March – June 2018)
After hulling and removing that last layer of parchment, it is finally time to bag all these beans up! The coffee should first be placed in grain pro bags to protect it from moisture and other contaminants before it is bagged into the classic looking burlap coffee sacs we are all so familiar with. This coffee is now ready to be shipped, either to a roaster or distributor inside the country of origin or exported out to another country like the U.S.
Shipping (July – September 2018)
If you thought the harvesting, processing and packaging was a long process then just wait until you see what this coffee still has to go through before it ends up here at Nilaa Coffee and ready to be roasted for you! Once an exporter has contracted to ship the coffee out of country, they will arrange to have it picked up at the dry mill or warehouse and taken to the most convenient port of departure. Here in Myanmar, that would be Yangon.
The coffee will be loaded into container before it is placed onto a ship for its long journey across the oceans from continent to continent. Just to give you an idea, a container is so large that it can hold more than 300 bags of coffee; and each bag has 130 lbs of coffee in it. We’ll take care of the math for you: that is more than 40,000 lbs or 20 tons of coffee beans!!
From here, it could take months for that coffee to make its way to the port of entry here in the United States. And customs delays in any country along the way could hold things up. Finally, though, your coffee made it’s way into the Port of New York and New Jersey after a long and exhausting ride on a shipping container. After waiting a little longer for any U.S. Customs and administrative holdups, it will finally be delivered to it’s temporary housing at a warehouse in Northern New Jersey.
Delivery and Roast (Now!)
This is where we can finally get our hands dirty! We will pick up the coffee at the warehouse and take it to our roastery. It’s all fun and games from here: we roast, package, and sell to you!
See, no sweat right? It’s incredible what goes into growing, producing, shipping and roasting coffee. I hope this gave you a better idea of a coffee’s journey (dare we say) from “seed to cup.”