Many years ago in ancient Ethiopia, a shepherd discovered that his goats were very alert after eating the fruits of the coffee plant. One fine day the shepherd tasted them to see for himself.
That is what the legend says about the origins of coffee, we asked Salvador Sans.
What do you think about this legend Salvador?
SALVADOR: we will never know that, because they are legends, like the legend about tea or chocolate, what we do know is that the coffee plant has been on planet earth since the quaternary and has 124 different species, of which only 2 are for cultivation, the Arabica and the Robusta, all these species are native to Africa.
Arabica is a relatively recent plant, crossed between robusta and the Canéfora variety. These two plants acted as father and mother and a new plant called Arabica was born, indigenous to the highlands between Ethiopia and Sudan.
The Arabica has a particularity in that it is genetically different because it has 44 chromosomes instead of the 22 that the other 123 species have.
One of its great advantages is that the plant is self-pollinating and therefore genetically very stable, which is why it has grown wild in the bushes of Ethiopia for centuries and centuries.
It is not known when man began to use it, what we do know is that in Ethiopia it has been used for centuries in various ways, not only as a beverage but also as food.
In addition, 50% of coffee is consumed internally by Ethiopians, it is part of their culture and traditions.
Climate change may affect coffee very much, perhaps in the year 2050 if we do not manage to change things, Arabica coffee will have no place in our world.
How is coffee grown?
SALVADOR: Coffee is the seed of a very sweet fruit by the way, there are animals that eat them, humans have also eaten them for a long time. This seed has to be removed and therefore has a skin, a pulp, the mucilage and the coffee beans. It has to be separated in such a way that the bean is not contaminated by any kind of undesirable fermentation, it is difficult.
There are several ways to do it, one is to remove the skin and wash it well with water for 24-36 hours as long as the climatic conditions allow it, then clean it and remove the sugar from the pulp so that it does not ferment on its own and communicate any defective taste.
It can also be done by picking the ripe fruit from the plant and putting it to dry as if it were a bunch for 21 days in the sun, moving it constantly, these things make coffee an extremely complex thing.
Then the coffee needs 2-3 months of care for the chemical elements such as sugar and acids to stabilize. And then it depends from where they are, from Papua to New Guinea to the port of Barcelona, more or less 3 months of navigation, but normally the coffee has to be sold always in season, the coffee is a fiber if it loses the humidity that it has inside it is wood.
Do coffee growers make a good living?
SALVADOR: A part of the coffee industry, although small, but already worldwide and increasingly large, in which the producers of premium coffees, the prices for these top coffees are very high.
Here prices are extraordinary, but that does not mean that it is for everyone, coffee is still in the London and New York stock exchanges as a commodity fluctuating according to the market and that is not good. The coffee producer should live with certainty and should have a cost-benefit economic framework, and not depending on whether this year in the world there have been 140 million bags of coffee, 150 or 90.
How do you explain the success of coffee and how does it reach Europe?
SALVADOR: Ethiopia is the place where the Arabica coffee plant is born, but it is not the first place where it is cultivated in an intensive way to sell it, that is in Yemen on the other side of the Red Sea, surely passed by slaves on the other side, or probably the Arabs knew this beverage to make trade and began to plant it in Yemen.
Until the 17th century it was forbidden by Yemeni law to harvest a single seed.
In the end they managed to bring it from several places and a few went to the current Reunion Island and others by the road to Mecca reached India, before coffee was cultivated in Latin America it was cultivated in India.
That pilgrim who managed to go to Mecca, took 7 coffee seeds with him and planted them in India. And the other pilgrims who went to the island also took a handful of seeds with them at the end of the XVI century.
To give you an idea, to make an espresso you need approximately 50 more coffee beans than those that the gentleman took with him. 2% of the entire extension of Central America is coffee plantations. It is a plant that has been a huge success because humans have liked it and it has changed our lives.
Coffee arrives to our lives in Europe at the end of the XVII century and since then its consumption has not stopped growing, in the middle of the XVIII century when coffee begins to substitute beer and wine as people’s lunch drink, and that is what the books say, not me. Curiously, the industrial revolution and the scientific and cultural revolution begin precisely when coffee begins to substitute alcohol as the main drink of the Europeans.
People go from being drunk on alcohol to seeing that this drink wakes them up, coffee has adapted to all cultures and is not forbidden by anyone.
There are many people who come to buy coffee at the store and say that they do not drink coffee anywhere, it is a shame and it is important that people drink coffee because there are 25 or 30 million coffee producers in the world waiting for us to drink it, why do we have to drink bad coffee in so many coffee shops?