EACH ASPECT OF THE COFFEE PROCESS EMBODIES A CERTAIN ROMANTIC SPIRIT.

For one who has been fortunate enough to travel throughout the coffee world, coffee is indeed a romantic beverage with much spirit and legend, and enough folklore to make it an interesting subject to write about.

Many of us know the legend about the origin of coffee, which tells us that an Ethiopian goatherd saw his flock of goats chewing the berries and seeds of bushes near him and then saw them frolicking around in a very spirited way.

He could not understand the liveliness of his flock, so he chewed some of the berries and seeds himself and soon found himself stimulated. He then, of course, told his friends about it, and pretty soon the stimulative effects of coffee were discovered - and the history of coffee began. This may just be a legend, but it's fun to conjure up an image of what might have happened to start coffee in this world.

The heart and soul of any agricultural commodity, of course, are its farmers, and coffee is no exception. The diversity of coffee farmers around the world is astounding, and the observation one can make about how they tend to their farms is indeed worth looking at.

Starting with Brazil, which is of course the largest coffee producing country in the world, we see large farms sometimes containing more than a million (and sometimes many millions) of trees. These farms, called fazendas, are sometimes self-contained little villages. The owner has his own estate, very similar to the U.S. southern plantations in the old south, and then there is a virtual village where the farm hands and their families live. This includes, in addition to housing, a school for the children, a church or a chapel, a clinic with a doctor, a recreation hall, and, of course, the inevitable soccer field.

While these villages are generally not ostentatious, they provide a reasonably good living standard for the farm hands, and one can generally observe a pretty happy group of people. They are employed full-time and enjoy a lifestyle a notch above many others in the "third world countries."

The labor force is generally enhanced during the harvesting season by migrating labor, which comes in during the harvest and helps to bring in the crops. It is wonderful to see the good care that most of these plantations receive and how great they generally look. In Brazil, coffee grows on rolling, hilly country with no real mountains, and the altitude is probably not more than 1,000 to 1,500 feet above sea level.

Quite different is the coffee culture of Colombia and Central America, where coffee is truly grown in mountainous areas, and the coffee farms are considerably smaller, although still of some size and scope. Coffee in many of these countries grows in the shade of other trees and requires a great deal of care. It is also somewhat more difficult to maintain than the fazendas in Brazil.

In this part of the world, coffee farms are called either haciendas or fincas. In these cases, the farmers generally employ people from the nearby villages, and the culture is somewhat different from the one that one observes in Brazil. Nevertheless, it is also an area where good care is taken of the coffee farms, and priming, trimming, and fertilizing is part of the routine.

Things have been greatly modernized over the last 25 years, but this writer can well remember in the 1960s traveling to Costa Rica and seeing the coffee cherries, after the harvesting, being brought to the de-pulping mills in ox-carts, which were most colorful. These were square wagons with wooden wheels with a base color of black, white, orange, or red and then over-painted in all colors of the rainbow with little designs, making for a romantic and pretty picture. Today everything has become motorized, but one can still buy exact replicas of these ox-carts in tourist boutiques.

In Africa, the Robusta countries grow their coffee rather similar to that in Brazil, where the holdings can be quite large in areas like the Cote d'Ivoire and the Cameroon's, and the coffee is grown in rolling hill country with not very high altitudes. The situation is somewhat different in the countries growing quality Arabica coffees, such as Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania. In Ethiopia, coffee, to some extent, grows wild, although more coffee plantations are being developed over time.

When this writer traveled to Ethiopia during the 1960s and 1970s, probably 30% of the crop grew wild in the bush, and the Ethiopian farmers simply went in there and picked the berries. Depending on what kind of price was available to them, better picking was done when the price was high, and picking methods were inferior when prices were low. We had many occasions to visit the primitive villages of the Ethiopians, but nevertheless the coffee farmers seemed to be just a notch above in economic status to that of other people living in the area.

In Kenya and Tanzania, where coffee was developed by the British and the Germans, respectively, coffee culture has been quite advanced, and coffee farms are indeed beautiful. One need only travel a few miles outside the Kenyan capitol of Nairobi to find some of the most beautiful coffee farms in the world, and for that reason Kenya, whose coffee grows above 5,000 feet, produces some of the finest varieties of coffee in the world. The British took great care of their coffee farms, and they probably could be models for farms all around the world. Almost the same is true for Tanzania.

Quite a different picture was noted in travels to Rwanda, a country recently in the news due to a Civil War, and Burundi, where coffee farming is quite different. Here, the farms are very small, with farmers growing a few crops and having as few as 50 trees; larger farms may have a few hundred trees. These farmers are poorer than farmers in other parts of the world and are growing coffee and a few other crops, which are suited to their soil, simply to sustain their families and certainly are not ever wealthy.

The real romantic aspect of coffee farming is the time when coffee is in flower. This, of course, happens once a year with a few exceptions, and during the short period of approximately two weeks, the coffee flowers provide the whole area with a jasmine-like scent. One of the other things one observes in some of the growing countries are the native costumes which the coffee pickers wear even when they are doing harvesting.

After coffee is harvested and processed, the final sorting takes place, which really determines the export quality of the coffee. This is the hand picking or sorting of the coffee into the various grades and varieties. During our travels through the producing countries in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, we saw in many areas, where there were large coffee mills, special large rooms where several hundred women were hand picking the coffee beans. They were paid on a per piece basis, that is to say they were given baskets of green coffee and had to pick all the imperfections out and then were paid on the basis of how many baskets a day they could complete with very strict criteria. Very often these pickers wore the traditional native costumes of the regions, and it made for a very colorful picture.

Also, because of the strong religious beliefs, these hand picking areas usually had a small altar with candles burning and flowers which were renewed on a daily basis by the women. In some countries, the women brought their infant babies and were actually breast feeding them while doing the handpicking. Much of this has been replaced since the 1970s by electronic sorting machines, which do almost as good a job as the handpickers, but in many countries we still see small groups of women hand picking the coffee one more time after the electric sorting process.

Another interesting aspect, also somewhat romantic, is the tasting of coffee which is done all over the world after coffee is harvested. Brazil is a particularly interesting example of coffee tasting. This writer has been in the offices of large Brazilian exporters who had tasting rooms with up to 12 and perhaps 15 cupping tables, with the cup tasters - who are called "classifiers" - working extremely hard during the harvesting season to classify the various coffees, depending on the quality observed. With the technique of slurping coffee and then spitting it out, it becomes a very noisy activity.

While the Brazilian and the U.S. coffee tasters sit around a revolving table and have the cups come to them, in the British and German dominated areas, very often coffees are tested on a long counter and the taster walks along the counter testing the various coffees, taking with him a spittoon on rollers, to spit out the coffee which he has been tasting. Obviously, the coffee must be tasted and spit out, because no one could absorb the coffee if we had to actually ingest it, as some of these classifiers taste several hundred cups of coffee a day.

Also very romantic are the coffee shops, Espresso bars, and coffee houses which in the 18th and 19th century were prevalent in Europe and have now made a comeback both in Europe and the U.S. In the U.S., particularly, this part of the romance of coffee has exploded. Today, we have thousands of specialty coffee shops all around the country, and all of them are attractive and interesting to the shopper. Many of them contain a gleaming roaster where coffee is roasted freshly on a daily basis and provides the wonderful aroma of roasted coffee throughout the store.

We also have the espresso, cappuccino, and cafe latte bars, which are springing up all over the country. Many of these coffee houses have also included sandwiches or pastries and have become a place to relax and enjoy a good cup of coffee. We have indeed returned to the so-called coffee "klatch", which is a German word meaning "relaxed conversation."

Coffee is a wonderful beverage, and much more could be written about it. This little overview should enforce our readers' feelings about the romantic side of this spirited beverage.