"A parachute jumper prepared for his first jump. 'Don’t forget,' reminded the instructor, 'if the first cord doesn’t work, pull the backup cord. Ready?'
'I’m ready!' said the jumper. He jumped, counted to ten, then pulled the cord. Nothing happened, so he pulled the backup cord. But still, nothing happened.
As he fell toward earth, a woman suddenly ɻew past him, up into the sky.
'Hey!' he yelled. 'Do you know anything about parachutes?'
'No,' she called back. 'Do you know anything about gas stoves?'" said Wulandari after her face like a rounded silver ball, catching the eyes in the night, speaking about the chaos that rolls in the daytime. In the middle of the day, she saw someone was hiding his face without a plea.
Wulandari then continued, "Coffee is universal in its appeal. All nations do it homage. It has become recognized as a human necessity. It is no longer a luxury or an indulgence; it is a corollary of human energy and human efficiency. People love coffee because of its two-fold effect—the pleasurable sensation and the increased efficiency it produces," that what our Barista said. But wait, why Barista? A barista in a specialty café is akin to a sommelier in the world of wine, says Anette Moldvaer. He or she is a professional with expert knowledge, capable of advising you on how to prepare coffee in a way that not only gives you a caffeine kick but also makes it taste interesting, exciting, and, most importantly, good. Yes indeed, it’s a career with a lot of men, but it's also unhindered for women, so, it's a work which refers to both male and female bartenders, regardless of gender. The important thing is, how do you pour things in your head, your ideas and concepts, into a mixture of hot or cold drinks, for your customers to enjoy.
So, let's move on to what the Barista tells me, "Civilization, in its onward march, has produced only three important non-alcoholic beverages—the extract of the tea plant, the extract of the cocoa bean, and the extract of the coffee bean, says William H. Ukers.
Leaves and beans—these are the vegetable sources of the world’s favorite nonalcoholic table beverages. Of the two, the tea leaves lead in total amount consumed; the coffee beans are second; and the cocoa beans are a distant third, although advancing steadily. But in international commerce, coffee beans occupy a far more important position than either of the others, being imported into nonproducing countries to twice the extent of tea leaves.
Coffee is a global beverage. It is grown commercially on four continents, and consumed enthusiastically in all seven: Antarctic scientists love their coffee. There is even an Italian espresso machine on the International Space Station. Coffee’s journey has taken it from the forests of Ethiopia to the fincas of Latin America, from Ottoman coffee houses to ‘third wave’ cafés, and from the coffee pot to the capsule machine.
Coffee is an everyday drink – whether gulped down first thing at breakfast, during a mid-morning break, as an afternoon pick-me-up or as a digestion aid after dinner. Most coffee drinkers have an instinctive sense of what they consider a good cup of coffee, yet few understand what contributes to producing it.
The major reason consumers lack the knowledge to appreciate their coffee is that the industry obscures its complexity and diversity by turning it into a homogenized commodity, says Jonathan Morris. Batches of beans harvested at one time are mixed with those picked at another; outputs from farms with different characteristics are combined; sacks from different regions are exported under the same label; green coffees are bought through an exchange where they are never actually seen, before the beans are roasted and blended with others from different countries to be sold under a brand label communicating generic characteristics: ‘Rich’, ‘Mellow’ or ‘Roaster’s Choice’.
Such strategies allow coffee from one source to be substituted with another. Natural events like drought, frost or disease, or man-made ones such as war, can set back coffee production in a region for years. Farmers, exporters, brokers and roasters use homogenization as a risk-management strategy. At least 90 per cent of world coffee production enters the commodity sector. The remaining 5–10 per cent is ‘specialty coffee’: high-quality coffee with a distinctive flavour profile and identifiable geographical origins. Like wine, a coffee’s flavour is reflective of the variety grown, the district’s micro-environment (terroir), the growing season’s prevalent climatic conditions, and the care with which it is harvested, processed, stored and shipped. Wine contains around three hundred compounds affecting its flavour; for coffee the figure is estimated to be well over a thousand. This ‘special(i)ty’ sector (Europeans used to include the ‘i’, Americans don’t) has grown exponentially over the last thirty years.
Coffee is a gift from Africa, where over 130 species of the genus Coffea have been identified. The Arabica coffee plant, Coffea arabica, evolved in the southwestern Ethiopian high-lands and bordering regions of Kenya and South Sudan, where it still grows wild today. Today Arabica is grown commercially throughout the tropics. It cannot survive outside this belt as the plants die if the temperature falls below freezing. Arabica was the first – and until the twentieth century, the only – species of coffee grown for human consumption. Currently it accounts for around two-thirds of world production.
During the last three decades of the nineteenth century, the coffee world was transformed by a devastating outbreak of leaf rust that virtually devastating outbreak of leaf rust that virtually wiped out production in Asia. Coffee cultivators, notably in the Dutch East Indies, started searching for alternative species. They tried Coffea liberica, or Liberian coffee, but this too proved susceptible to rust. They then shifted to Coffea canephora, known as Robusta, which was sourced from the Congo, via Belgium.
Robusta is not only rust resistant, but it tolerates higher temperatures and humidity than Arabica, making it capable of flourishing at lower elevations. The tree has an umbrella shape, with smaller but more numerous cherries gathered in clusters, making it easier to harvest. Its easy cultivation enabled it to be used as an entrée into coffee production, most recently by Vietnam. Currently Robusta forms around 35–40 per cent of world output. Robusta also contains twice the caffeine levels of Arabica.
Coffee has a ‘foundation myth’, much beloved by marketers, that one day Kaldi, a young Ethiopian goatherd, noticed his animals became agitated after eating a shrub’s red berries. Kaldi chewed the berries himself and ended up ‘dancing’ around. Kaldi was then either discovered by, or went to consult with, an imam, who also sampled the berries. He either found they kept him awake during late-night prayers so turned them into an infusion to share with others; or threw them in the fire in disgust only to smell their delicious aroma, deciding to retrieve them from the embers, grind them up, add hot water and drink the resulting beverage!
The Kaldi story first appeared in Europe in 1671 as part of a coffee treatise published by Antonio Fausto Naironi, a Maronite Christian from the Levant (today’s Lebanon) who had emigrated to Rome. He likely heard it in his homeland. Exactly when, where and in what forms humans first came to consume coffee cannot be definitively established. There are rumours of charred beans being found at ancient sites, and some suggest herbs and decoctions described in the Canon of Medicine by the Persian physician and philosopher Ibn Sīnā (980–1037), also known as Avicenna, derive from the coffee plant.
It is certain that for the first two hundred or so years of coffee’s recorded existence, between 1450 and 1650, it was consumed almost exclusively by Muslim peoples whose custom sustained a coffee economy centred around the Red Sea. This was the world from which modern versions of the drink evolved and the foundations of the contemporary coffee house format laid.
The Oromo tribe, occupying a large swathe of southern Ethiopia, including the Kaffa and Buno regions in which Arabica coffee is indigenous, prepare a variety of foodstuffs and beverages utilizing different elements of the plant. Buna is the most well known. Dried coffee husks are simmered in boiling water for fifteen minutes before the resultant beverage is served. Today, coffee farmers have started selling a similar product named cascara, consisting of the dried cherry skins removed during processing, brewed as a fruit tea. Named qishr in Arabic, this infusion appears to have made its way across the 32 kilometres (20 mi.) of the Bab-el-Mandeb straits at the southern end of the Red Sea during the mid-fifteenth century. The Arab scholar Abd al-Qadir al-Jaziri, whose manuscript Umdat al safwa fi hill al-qahwa, written around 1556, is the principal information source on coffee’s spread in the Islamic world and reproduces an account claiming that al-Dhabani travelled to Ethiopia.
Jean de la Roque—author, traveller and son of the merchant who introduced coffee to Marseille–wrote accounts of two trading expeditions to Mocha from the Breton port of St Malo, in 1709 and 1711. These reveal it took six months to fill the ship’s hold, even though the Frenchmen were using a Banyan broker, whose attempts to acquire beans on their behalf drove up the prices in Bayt al-Faqih. A Dutch factor they encountered reckoned on taking a year to acquire cargo for one voyage. By the 1720s, Red Sea coffee shipments had reached 12,000–15,000 tonnes per annum–effectively the world supply. That volume remained largely unchanged over the next hundred years, even though by 1840 it accounted for no more than 3 per cent of world production. Given this, it is hardly surprising that, as they increasingly adopted the beverage, Europeans sought to establish alternative cultivation centres. After the 1720s, the Dutch turned to Java and the French to the Caribbean, so their purchases from Mocha and Alexandria, respectively, declined. These were compensated by increased purchases by the British and the Americans. The revenues from the coffee trade were still such that Muhammad Ali, the expansionist ruler of Egypt, sought to conquer Yemen to bring them under his control. This led the British to seize Aden in 1839, protecting their influence in the region, and establishing it as a free port in 1850. The absence of customs duties and the presence of deep-water quays and warehousing facilities saw Aden overtake Mocha as the region’s chief coffee port. Today the harbour area of Mocha houses a small fishing fleet and many ruins, and is approached through silted-up channels, supposedly the consequence of nineteenth-century American ships discharging their ballast prior to taking coffee on board.
Few Europeans, except those under Ottoman rule, had tasted coffee before the middle of the seventeenth century. Its introduction into Europe led to the creation of the coffee house and café, whose appeal extended to large swathes of European society. The eighteenth century witnessed a dramatic reconfiguration of coffee’s production centres as European states, such as the Dutch Republic, France and Britain, began growing coffee in their Asian and Caribbean colonial holdings to satisfy consumers’ increasing demand.
Chocolate, coffee and tea came to the continent in quick succession, and consumer preferences shifted back and forth. Guild regulation complexities prevented traders from setting up premises to sell and serve coffee. Consequently, there were significant discontinuities in the diffusion of coffee culture. Venice was probably the first European city in which coffee was brewed, but a coffee house did not open there until a century afterwards. London was home to Europe’s first coffee houses, yet the British were among the last and the least active of the European coffee producers. Conversely the French, late converts from chocolate, went on to dominate both consumption and colonial production during the eighteenth century.
Coffee’s adoption across Christian Europe reflected the continent’s complex relationship with the Islamic Near East. Outbreaks of fascination with the ‘Orient’ provoked interest in coffee, yet travellers writing in the early seventeenth century often sought to rescue the beverage from its Muslim associations by reimagining its past. The Italian Pietro della Valle suggested coffee was the basis of nepenthe, the stimulant prepared by Helen in Homer’s Odyssey. The Englishman Sir Henry Blount claimed it was the Spartans’ black broth drunk before battles. By locating coffee among the ancient Greeks, they effectively claimed it for European civilization, and reminded contemporaries of coffee-drinking Christians within the Ottoman borders. There is, though, no evidence that Pope Clemente VIII tasted coffee and baptized it as a Christian beverage in the 1600s, although the story’s widespread circulation suggests those with a stake in the coffee trade wished he had done so.
Coffee was present in Venice in 1575, as the coffeemaking equipment recorded in the inventory of a murdered Turkish merchant in the city confirmed. By 1624 it was being shipped into the city for sale by apothecaries as a medicinal product, and in 1645 a shop selling beans appears to have been licensed. Coffee’s use spread to other Italian states: Tuscany awarded a monopoly for trading in coffee in 1665. Regulations protecting the apothecary trade probably account for the late appearance of the first café allowed to serve coffee in Venice in 1683. By 1759 the city authorities were forced to cap the number of cafés at 204 – a limit breached within four years.
England evolved the first European coffee house culture. The leading figures in bringing the bean to Britain were also émigrés from the Ottoman Empire. Nathaniel Conopios, a Greek student at Balliol College, Oxford, was the first person recorded drinking coffee in England in May 1637. Pasqua Rosee, an ethnic Armenian from the Ottoman city of Smyrna (now Izmir) opened London’s, and Europe’s, first documented coffee house sometime between 1652 and 1654. Rosee’s business began as a stall in St Michael’s churchyard in the heart of the City of London, the independent borough at the metropolis’s centre that contained most of London’s financial and commercial institutions. Merchants would come from the nearby Royal Exchange to continue conversations while sipping coffee under the awning of Rosee’s stall. According to the first reference to the business, in 1654, it served ‘a Turkish-kind of drink made of water and some berry or Turkish-beane (that was) somewhat hot and unpleasant (but had) a good after relish and caused some breaking of wind in abundance’.
It was no accident that coffee houses were established during the Cromwellian era following the English Civil War’s end. Coffee houses survived the monarchy’s restoration in 1660 because Royalist opponents of the Parliamentary regime had also taken advantage of the opportunities these venues created for unmonitored conversation.
The first documented coffee house outside the capital was opened by apothecary Arthur Tillyard in 1656. Tillyard was ‘encouraged to do so by some royalists, now living in Oxon, and by others who esteemed themselves either virtuosi or wits’. The term ‘virtuosi’ described gentlemen possessed of intellectual curiosity about cultural novelties, rarities and the fledgling field of empirical, quasi-scientific enquiry associated with figures such as Francis Bacon. As virtuosi Tillyard’s customers included Issac Newton, the father of modern physics, the astronomer Edmond Halley (of comet fame) and the collector Hans Sloane, whose bequest formed the basis of the British Museum. Most of the virtuosi were not such outstanding scholars but enthusiasts who could be enticed into coffee houses to inspect displays of curiosities.
Coffee’s association with the coffee house may have held back its adoption in the home. The coffee house was essentially a male environment in which talking to strangers was encouraged. The only women present were either serving or ‘servicing’ the customer’s needs. The Women’s Petition against Coffee – a 1674 condemnation of both coffee and coffee houses on the grounds that they kept men away from the home and rendered them impotent – was probably sponsored by brewers keen to recapture lost customers, but it played on this gender division.
Well-bred women were directed towards tea. Tea was favoured by several royal role models, notably the Portuguese Catherine of Braganza, who introduced it to the English court in 1662 when she married Charles II.
Subsequently England was ruled by two sovereign queens, Mary (1688–94) and her sister Anne (1702–14), both of whom were tea drinkers. Women might take tea together, either at home, or publicly in tea gardens where the open-air settings conferred a visibility, rendering them respectable places for ladies.
In the second half of the eighteenth century coffee houses began to offer alcohol alongside coffee, effectively turning back into taverns, as the number of pubs with names like The Turk’s Head indicates. One example was The Turk’s Head in Gerrard Street, London, which hosted a literary club in 1764. Members included the great lexicographer Dr Samuel Johnson and his biographer James Boswell. They drank tea and wine respectively.
This contrasted with the French café, which, though slower to become established, developed into a social institution appealing to all classes during the eighteenth century. Coffee was traded in Marseilles by the 1640s but remained largely unknown in Paris until 1669. In that year a diplomatic mission was sent by Sultan Mehmed IV to Louis XIV, probably instigated by the French ambassador to Constantinople to impress his own sovereign. The delegation remained for almost a year, entertaining influential courtiers with Turkish delicacies like coffee in a mansion refurbished as a Persian palace. This inspired ‘Turkomania’ among French society’s upper echelons, as satirized in Molière’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme. Vendors started selling coffee during trade fairs in the Saint-Germain commercial district, and an Armenian named Pascal established the first Parisian coffee house in 1671, only to see it fail after this Turkish fad subsided.
The café, in that era, was part of the masculine world. Although many cafés were run by couples, with the woman working front of house while her male partner prepared the drinks and accompaniments in the backroom ‘laboratory’, few women set foot in a café for fear of being mistaken as prostitutes due to the café’s public nature and its trade in alcohol. If women were served coffee, it was likely taken to their carriage to be drunk in privacy.
Bourgeois women chose chocolate, not least for its supposedly medicinal qualities. Coffee began to challenge this primacy with the spread of café au lait. Café au lait could be presented as French rather than foreign in origin."
"It seems that our chatting needs to be extended," said Wulandari. "Okay, we will continue in the next session," replied the Barista whose smile like, wow!
Both then sang,
I used to think
I had the answers to everything
But now I know
That life doesn't always go my way *)
