Jean Stewart, age 17, of Meridian, Miss., for her question:
HOW DO COFFEE BEANS GROW?
Coffee beans, that are first roasted and then ground into a powder that is used to make the popular drink, grow on trees that can be found in many countries that have temperate climates.
The scientific name for the tree is Coffee arabica and it originally grew wild in Ethiopia. Now it is cultivated in Central and South America, the West Indies, Mexico, Hawaii, equatorial Africa, Arabia and India. The coffee tree can grow to be about 20 feet tall, but growers usually keep it pruned to under 12 feet. It has glossy, evergreen leaves and produces white flowers.
A cup of coffee starts when a coffee berry grows from the tree's blossom. As the berry ripens, it turns from green to yellow to red. The average tree bears enough berries each year to make about a pound and a half of roasted coffee.
Usually a coffee tree must be five years old before it will bear a full crop of berries.
All of the coffee berries have to be picked by hand because no other method of harvesting them has been found. Machines cannot do the job.
After the berries are picked, they are put through a sluice, which is a bath of running water. Sticks, leaves and the green and bad berries float to the top. The good ones sink to the bottom.
The good berries next go to a pulping house where machinery removes the pulp. Each berry contains two beans. Each bean has a thin parchment like skin, and a second covering called the silver skin. At first, the uncovered coffee beans are soft and bluish green in color, but later they become hard and turn pale yellow.
Next the beans are washed and dried and then left to cure for weeks.
Then comes the hulling and peeling. Shipped in 132 pound burlap bags, the beans then go to the roasting plant.
At the coffee roasting plant, the beans are emptied into chutes where air suction devices first remove dust and other materials.
After the dust is removed, the coffee beans go to a blending machine. This contains a cylinder that mixes different types of beans.
From the blender the beans flow by gravity to storage bins and then go to roaster ovens. During the roasting, the beans lose about a sixth of their weight.
After the beans are cooled and cleaned, they are put into bins where they are stored until it is time to grind them. After grinding into drip, regular or fine, the coffee is either packed into vacuum cans or paper bags.
American roasters place much importance on the taste of their blends. They pack different blends for different parts of the country.