Earlier this week I promised a little bit more on the topic of sweetness in coffee.
First of all, to review, good coffee should be sweet. There are many different stages and processes that coffee goes through on the way to your mouth, and each one can have a profound impact on the sweetness. The first stage is the coffee tree itself.
Coffee is a fruit. What we roast up and brew is the seed of that fruit. Just like any fruit, coffee is sweetest when it's ripe, and the same holds true for the seeds (the "beans"). When fully ripe the seeds hold all kinds of complex organic compounds which would serve as food for a growing coffee seedling, including a complex family of sugars and other sweet compounds.
Some people used to claim that the reason that the Kopi Luwak coffee (you know, the famous "poo coffee") was so sweet was that the civet cat ate only ripe fruit, in a special mysterious civet cattish way that humans were forever ignorant of. Well, that explanation might have flown back in the bad old days. Today, though of course most human coffee production unfortunately involves lots of green cherries still, there are hundreds of quality operations out there that select only ripe red cherries. Humans have proven every bit as reliable in choosing only red as a civet cat could ever hope to be. Come on, humans, cut your species some slack! We're not that stupid.
Speaking of stupid, the first time I visited a coffee farm during harvest, I was so stoked to be eating the fruit that I ate dozens of cherries and later ended up with a severe headache, stomach ache and palpitating heart. Those cherries are caffeinated, too! I just figured that out way too late.
A few more notes on sweetness as a function of the coffee plant itself:
The higher the altitude the coffee was born at, the denser the beans tend to be. This can lead to an increase in acidity, complexity, and yes, sweetness.
Rainfall and sunlight can greatly influence the sweetness of a given coffee, but it's not the case that more or less of one or the other will lead to more sweetness. It's a complex interaction. Coffee trees, for instance, do best in mixed sunlight and shade. The percentages of this shade depends on the latitude of the farm, the altitude, the soil, and the varietal.
I'm not aware of any direct relationship between soil-type and sweetness. Obviously, proper soil for a given plant will lead to healthy, sweet fruit. But I do not know of any correlation between one particular soil type and levels of sweetness in the cup. This kind of thing generally shows up more in the aromatics (the iron tastes in volcanic soil coffees, for example). If anyone has information on the question of soil and sweetness, I'd love to hear about it in the comments.
So the first step in sweet coffee is sweet coffee fruit. If you start with green, unripe cherries, even in relatively small amounts, you are sabotaging the whole thing right from the start. But that's only the first step. We still have a long way to go to a sweet beverage.
Next time I will take a look at how processing affects sweetness.
coffee cherry photo by
How healthy am I and how long can i expect to live?
I'm 5"5, 7 Stone 9 male, who live in the north of England . I exercise about 2 hours a week. I eat at least 4 portions of fruit and veg a day. Both my grandma's have diabetes, my grandfather had glaucoma and my grandmother that passed away before I was born had cancer.
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