In which I talk at some length about COFFEE

This blog post comes to you in three parts, one in which I talk a bit about myself, one in which I talk about coffee, and one in which I talk about current events.

PART THE FIRST, in which I give an introduction

I am a relatively easy person to please. I like people, to an extent that some might find rather odd in that I rarely DISlike people. The same sort of thing goes for movies and hot drinks. As such, I am a pretty bad critic of everything except perhaps books. (Except that there are a fair amount of hot drinks that I dislike. But it's an overwhelming minority.)

I like chai and sample it wherever I can get it (Corner Bakery in Chicago sells chai out of a multi-gallon jug, and yes, if you are reading this, I reiterate that this is worse than a single-gallon pitcher, which is to say it is really, really terrible--so terrible that for the rest of the weekend I would feel a little sick when I heard someone ordering it). I drink copious amounts of hot chocolate. I'm a little picky about my tea.

Coffee, though, is GOD. At one point in my life, I got up to three cups of coffee daily (thank you, NaNoWriMo). I have had coffee that cost six dollars, I have had coffee that was free. I have had instant coffee and coffee from a French press and coffee from various chains and coffee from not-chains and lots of coffee that I made at home in a variety of different styles of coffee makers.

And I still feel I know nothing about coffee. Seriously. Because, remember, I don't DISlike a lot of hot drinks. I am not a connoisseur of coffee. I cannot comment on what makes good coffee and what makes bad coffee.

Today, however, I inadvertently ended up on something of a quest to find out what good coffee is, and really what coffee is at all.

PART THE SECOND, in which I educate yo selves about coffee

None of this I knew before today, which is why I am telling it to you now, as it makes me feel Informed&Intelligent, and also it is just pretty friggin' interesting, as a certain astronomy teacher might say.

A big, beautiful Coffea arabica tree in sunny Brazil.

This is a coffee tree. I don't know what I thought coffee grew on before, but somehow I didn't think it grew on a big bush-looking tree thing like this.

Perhaps I thought coffee beans were, you know, beans. But no. They're not. They're seeds. You see the little red specks on that tree? Those are coffee berries.

Coffee berries.

Inside the berries are the coffee beans. Apparently, you can also eat the berries and the leaves of the plant. Who knew.

Coffea arabica is the "good" sort of coffee tree, which is to say apparently this sort of tree makes better coffee than other trees. 

Unfortunately, it is also, as Mr Taylor Clark called it in the New York Times today, "A finicky diva of a plant". If it is below 4,000 feet elevation, if it gets slightly less than four inches of rain, if the temperature deviates too far from a balmy 68 degrees Fahrenheit, it could just up and die. 

The market is finicky as well. Nine years ago, farmers were being told to stop growing coffee because demand was so low, crushing millions of pounds into fertiliser. Prices had fallen to $0.48 a pound (the fair market price, at which farmers can eat and all, is well over a dollar). 

Today, prices are about eight times that.

The thing about coffee, though, is that it's ridiculously difficult to try and follow the capitalist supply/demand route, as it takes four years for the coffee plants to mature. So if a farmer plants his plot of extra coffee now because it's selling like crazy, it'll be four years before his investment comes back--and who knows what demand will be like in four years. Or whether the bloody plant will even live that long.

So then you end up with stuff like we've got now. The possibility of (I dearly hope you're sitting down now) A SHORTAGE OF COFFEE. (Told you so.)

PART THE THIRD, in which I talk about dire possibilities of the present and future and also Starbucks

Coffee, as most people are probably quite aware, is frequently rather expensive. And it is getting worse.

See, people are fearing we may have hit "peak coffee". If this reminds you of the term "peak oil", it is because they are essentially the same thing, except that one is talking about a plant and one is talking about a nonrenewable resource that takes millions of years to form beneath the Earth's surface.

Yields are declining. Because of global warming, diseases are beginning to become more prominent, and heavier rainfall can ruin crops. Prices are on the rise.

All may not be lost. Coffee is a ridiculously finicky plant, perhaps it's just in an angsty mood. It's probably not time yet to start stockpiling Arabica beans.

At the same time... It might be wise to think twice before the caffeine addiction starts setting in around finals. 

Shakily yours,

IBI

Pictures are from Wikipedia. Facts are either from this very interesting conglomeration of opinion pieces on the New York Times' Room for Debate, or this Science article.