Coffee

I'm terrible at blogging.  I know I could write more often, but the man-baby and the infinite challenges the cafe throw at us never allows for such luxuries.

Twitter affords a 5-second brain fart to guff onto the masses, spefically the food-obsessed yeggers I feel driven to feed once in a while, such is their influence and friendliness to us country folk out here in the tiny hamlet/ oil refinery world of S'park.

But I digress, and I almost feel compelled to punch myself in the mouth with my unnecessary two-paragraph introduction which precisely tells you nothing apart from my puffed-up opinion of online media....who cares?!

But here's the reason for this blahhhg post: 10 things about coffee that normal functioning people (i.e. not coffee geeks) have never known or considered about this prodcut:

1. It's not a bean.  It is the seed of a coffee cherry, whose fruit is delicious when ripe.
2. The most dedicated farmers will visit their coffee trees up to seven times to only pick the cherries when they are ripe.  This is rare in the coffee industry.
3. The average farm has 7,000 trees (1 hectare).
4. The average farm does not have running water.
5. The average farmer does not drink coffee.
6. One coffee tree makes 1lb of green coffee each year.
7. It is a food.  There are seasons to coffee and the green 'bean' will fade over time, often losing its acidity the longer it sits in burlap sacks.  Roasting fresh is great but doesn't mean much if the green is two years old.
8. Roast date of your coffee is important.  Ask or check the bag you are buying.  You wouldn't buy stale fruit.
9. Dark roasted coffee gives you a flavour from the actual roasting process, i.e. it cooks out all the unique characteristics of that coffee.  This is usually done to hide the inferior qualities of the product.
10. How you grind coffee is crucial.  Burr grinders used to be expensive but Hario hand grinders have changed all that (so long as you don't mind the effort it takes).

So there's ten things mildly interesting about coffee.