Coffee: The World's Drug of Choice

There's a 98 percent chance you're drinking coffee right now. Maybe not, sure, but coffee is ubiquitous - about 80 percent of Americans consume coffee and Brazil alone has 3 billion coffee plants. Learn all about the great black brew in this episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know
from house Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W Chuck Bryant.
We've been drinking coffee. I am actually Josh. I told

(00:23):
you what did I tell you ten minutes ago that
you are drinking coffee? And you showed me even that
you are, so I believe. And it's my first cup
since when, like last February or so, which is weird, man,
because you were on talking for a while. You talked
really fast. You're like, I feel weird and it was
fun to watch, and then I guess I hadn't noticed.
But yeah, I just stopped. Why. Uh, I'm just not

(00:48):
you know, I'm not a regular coffee drinker. I drink
it when I'm in the mood or when it's cold.
But a year in between cups is beyond not a
regular coffell. It hasn't been cold. It's like avoidance. I
just maybe it's been I've had some since in Yeah.
Actually I had one of those gingerbread lat taste yesterday.
Those are good they're real good. Eggnog's good too. It's
almost like not coffee though to me, because you and

(01:09):
I drink it black dessert treat generally, which I'm not
you know, I'm not saying that's the way you should
drink it. But I just really enjoyed the taste of
black coffee about eight times a year. I'm with you.
I've cut my intake down tremendously since then, since last February,
down to a dozen cups a day, down to like
a third of that, No, a quarter of that, three

(01:30):
three or four cups three about three. It's not bad.
And it's all decaf too, It's almost all decaf, but
I still get wired buzz. It's weird. Yeah. What do
they call that? The old psychosomatic reactions? Junkie? Yeah? So, Chuck, Yes,
you asked me a question. I was like, this is
the absolute truth, deory listener Um. Chuck asked me a question, uh,

(01:54):
because I said I didn't have any any intro to this,
and he said, well, would you know the origin a
cup of Joe? And I said, yes, I do, so
here's the intro. Spotan eighty back during World War two, right, Uh,
the US worked closely with the British, and the British
already had um something called a cuppa c U p

(02:14):
p A. Hey to our British friends over there, you
guys can go to sleep for a minute because you
know this. But a cuppa is just a cup of tea.
But t is so ubiquitous. That's just saying c U
p p a means a cup of tea. A couple
you're gonna have a cuppa. That means d having some
tea exactly. But coffee is so thoroughly ingrained in the

(02:34):
American culture, I believe, Chuck, there's a statue you furnished
me with that eight percent of Americans consumed coffee. And
it's been this way for a long time, right, And
that's consumed not necessarily regularly, but consume, consume, take in
like I'm part of. This is already well established by
World War Two. So when American g i's were hanging

(02:56):
out with British soldiers, um, they drank coffee like all
the time. It was part of the rations drag coffee.
There's even matches included not just to let your cigarettes,
but to light a fire for a kettle if you
needed to coffee is just as ubiquitous among American servicemen
as T was with um G I s Well, American
serviceman slang is g I joe. You put Kappa and

(03:22):
before joe, and you have a cup of joe. And
that that is why coffee is called joe. Yeah, all right,
that mystery soft. It was a good intro, Chuck, well done.
It was teamwork. So this is I'm pretty excited about
this one. Actually, it was a good article. It was
a really good artic written by the esteemed and uh

(03:42):
unknown Deborah Beller. Have you heard of Debora Beller? Never
must be a freelancer. All right, So let's get to
the history first, because that's what we like to do
here on the podcast program. Uh there's an ancient um
not ancient, but it's a legend. It's perhaps a myth.
No one knows for sure about Calde the Ethiopian goat herder.

(04:06):
Well he has a name, so you know it's for real.
And supposedly what happened is he saw his goats mowing
down on these weird green uh fruits. I'm sorry, red
at first cheeze already miss set up and he noticed
they were you know, they called him dancing goats. They
started to get a little frisky and not sleep at
night like they're supposed to, and he said, oh, what

(04:29):
is this stuff? I gotta get ahold of this. There's
two versions from here. He took it to a local
monastery and either the abbot there made a drink from
it that kept him and the rest of his monk's awake,
so they said this is awesome, or he said no,
this is bad, and he threw it in the fire,
which produced that nice aroma, and then he said, hey,

(04:50):
maybe it's not so bad. So either way, it's probably legend,
but it's a nice story. Yeah, and there's a there's
a coffee company here in Atlanta, don't know where they're based. Originally,
if it could be, Atlantic, called dancing goats. And that
is why I never thought about that. There's a lot
of Caldy coffees around the country. Oh yeah, I never
thought that. Yeah, well, okay, yeah, dancing goats. They're like

(05:15):
they're crazy for the coffee. Have you ever seen a
goat dance? I have not. I used to dance with
my goat. I've seen a painting goat, but not a
dancing goat. So so that's the legend history, right. Um.
We know that ancient African tribes my ancient I mean
like prehistoric meaning pre writing, how about that? Okay, especially

(05:37):
along the eastern coast of Africa. UM had this Basically
they made little power bars. They would take um animal
fat and then they would take the coffee berries and
either smush them and then put them in animal fat
or else they just put the whole coffee bears and
animal fat and then eat them and then they would
like they would have a lot more energy after that.

(06:00):
Pretty cool, right, this uh originated probably in Ethiopia, Ethiopias
biggest naturally there. Yes, a certain type does um uh.
Years later that so we leave Africa. Now Africa they're
eating their power bars. Um. We go to the Arabian Peninsula,
and the same kind of coffee grows there on the

(06:21):
Arabian Peninsula as does as thrives well in the Ethiopian highlands.
Should we go ahead and call it what it is Arabica, okay?
And that is like the primo coffee as far as
coffee drinkers are concerned. The wine of Araby right. Um,
On the Arabian Peninsula, somewhere around a thousand a d.
Somebody figured out that you could roast the stuff and

(06:43):
make it into a concoction of brew if you will,
and start drinking it hot drink bye. I think the
thirteenth century, a couple hundred years later, Um, the Muslims
which had conquered Um the Arabian Peninsula by then, UM
knew that they had something really special with the coffee.
So they would export coffee beans, but you would be

(07:04):
beheaded if you tried to get a plant or a
seed out right. They want to keep it, yeah, because
they knew, like, we can basically control the world with this. Yeah.
And I found that that there's something called the kabe Kane,
which was the public coffee houses in the Arabian Peninsula,
and they were hugely popular still are I'm sure? And

(07:27):
they it's at that time, and this is what do
you say, one thousand d. Well, they they had a
lockdown on coffee by the thirteenth century. Okay, long time
ago though, but early on coffee already started to have
a link between drinking this stuff and sitting around with
people and talking about smart things. It wasn't like going

(07:48):
to a bar where you get slashed and talk about
you know, the good old days, you know, and end
up weeping exactly. Uh. So they called these kab Kane's
uh Schools of the Wise, and then later in England
there were more than three hundred of these in London
by the sixteen hundreds, and they were called penny universities

(08:09):
because a cup of coffee was a penny and you
would sit around and like learn stuff in the US
now in London, okay, nice, So there was always a link.
I just found it interesting from the very beginning, between
drinking coffee and talking smarts like we're doing right, go ahead,
check okay, No, that's all I had, okay. Um. So

(08:32):
we we were saying that the Muslims had a lockdown
on coffee. But there was supposedly a legend. There's a
couple of legends, legends of people getting it out of
the Arab Peninsula and into the rest of the world. Um,
And one of them is an Indian smuggler named Baba
Boudon Baba Booi Baba boud Okay, and he left Mecca.

(08:54):
Supposedly there was some seed strap to his chest and
made it out and um started growing coffee in India right. Well,
the fact that it was Mecca was it may not
have spread the same because Mecca was obviously a destination
still is for pilgrimages, so it may it may not
have picked up if it hadn't have been for the
fact that it was in Mecca, right. Um, I supposedly,

(09:14):
I don't know how it got out to Europe, but
the first um first coffee plantation, first European controlled coffee plantation,
was established in Java by the Dutch in sixteen sixteen UM.
And then it made its way across the Atlantic, and
you can kind of see like little by little, there's
like histories and legends about how coffee spread, which is

(09:35):
pretty cool. Um. So it made its way into India
thanks to Baba Bouddhan. It made its way to um
Brazil thanks to a spy named Lieutenant Colonel Paletta, who
was sent by the Emperor of Brazil at the time
in seventeen seven to get coffee from Yeah, from French Guiana,

(09:56):
go find the ambassador's wife or the the the Emperor
of of French Guiana. The ambassador, go find his wife
and seduce her and get some coffee sack seedlings. And
he did. Yeah, apparently he was a looker, and she
was a sucker for a handsome mug. And so when
he left, she gave him a bouquet of flowers and

(10:17):
he hid them inside the flowers. So there you have it,
and coffee is president BRAZILA. Now Brazil's like the world's
leading grower. I believe of coffee. That true. I think
in Brazil alone, Um, there are five million people who
are employed to cultivate and harvest three billion coffee plants.

(10:39):
That's just in Brazil alone. Wow, so you mentioned Europe.
Though coffee in Europe it would have not taken hold
in Europe nearly as aggressively if it hadn't have been
for Pope Clement the Eighth. Did you hear about this guy?
It was Originally coffee was very controversial obviously, uh, early
on because it's a drug, gonna stimulant, and a lot

(11:01):
of Europeans cautioned against the bitter invention of satan. They
took it to Pope Clement and said, hey, dude, you
gotta rule on this evil stuff. And he went, well,
let me give it a try first. He gave notice
everyone has a Brooklyn accent now, and um, he gave
it a try and said Wow, this stuff is pretty awesome. Actually,

(11:21):
I'm gonna give it the stamp of approval. So Pope
Clement gave it the papal stamp, and that's why it
became so popular in Europe. Well, yeah, it was vindicated papally,
and if it hadn't have been, who knows. So okay,
well we'll talk about Europe for a second. You were
talking about how um the penny academies, penny universities, penny universities.
So um. There's also been a lot of companies that

(11:44):
are still around today. A lot of just to set
a lot of huge events have taken place or begun
or find the roots in coffee houses. Lloyd's of London,
rue Lloyds of London, UM, the huge insurance company, I
think the world's largest insure began in a coffee house
that was owned by a guy named Edward Lloyd, and
I guess to make a little electra money on the

(12:05):
side or to keep his patrons happy, he kept a
list of all the ships that were insured by some
of his UM patrons, who I guess at the time
you could get somebody to cover your ship as an investment,
and Edward Lloyd started keeping track of it, hence Lloyd's
of London. And now you have your tonsils insured because

(12:26):
of that very day. Man. That costs me, but it's
going to be worth than just in case. Um. Also,
do you remember how I said that coffee is just
so ingrained in American culture? Do you know why? The
answer is totally obvious, but so obvious. Yes, it's so obviously.
You just walk right past it and you don't hear
a lot of I'm not pressed, but you just don't

(12:48):
read about that a lot unless And it wasn't just
the Boston Tea Party that did it. It was, I mean,
that was part of it, but it was all of
the taxes on tea that really made it prohibitive for
people to drink, so they started switching to coffee. And
then it became something of a point of national pride,
and and the Boston Tea Party itself was planned in

(13:09):
a coffee house called the Green Dragon. That is very true.
So coffee is very much, um, just from the from
the get go, from the it's the reason why everybody
is sub jacked up for the American Revolution. Well, it's
just it's interesting all these stories come together to make
coffee like the fact that it was in Mecca, the
fact that the Pope gave it the stamp of approval,

(13:29):
the Boston tea party, the ties with smart talk in
coffee houses. It's all those things came together to form
the perfect storm of what is now the second leading
h import or export or just commodity. Aside from second
leading commodity, as far as I understand, it's far. It

(13:50):
ranks second to petroleum in terms of dollars traded world crazy,
and it's the most popular drink on the planet aside
from water. And I imagine that's on the the no
normal market. I don't know if anything tops coffee on
the black market. Um, chuck, it's I think. You know.
There's plenty of reasons to love coffee, but probably the

(14:11):
most the most common reason to love coffee is um.
The trimethyl accident. Then yes, yes, C eight H ten
and four O two for those in the know. Uh,
that's caffeine UM, which has the same but a milder

(14:32):
effect on the brain is cocaine or opium meth I'm
starting to feel this already. I felt the first one
this morning. Yeah, um, And caffeine occurs naturally in a
number of plants. It's not just coffee, um, but it's
in like whamo amounts in coffee. Um. An average cup

(14:52):
of coffee has about a hundred milligrams of caffeine, where
if you have like a can of coke, twelve ounce
can of coke is fifty milligrams of caffeine. Yeah, so
I mean it's twice as much. And you can tell
I drank decaffeinated coffee just now and I'm a little
more just decalf yeah, and de careful explain how how
it comes about later on. But there is one plant

(15:14):
out there, um that naturally is decaffeinated, one naturally decaffeinated bean, right, yeah,
the Madagascar coffee crazy species, mascar coffea vigner I wonder
if that was naturally happened naturally, if it was bread
to be so, I don't know, we're not bread, but
you know what I mean. So, UM, we're talking about

(15:37):
the United States, and as big as junkies for coffee
as we are, there's only one state in um, the
Union where coffee can grow, and that is Hawaii. And
that's because Hawaii exists in the bean belt, that's right,
and they grow. They're very famous and delicious ConA copy
in the volcanic mountains and the bean belt. It's on
the Big Island, on the Big Island, Hawaiian guy. Now

(16:00):
you know that. Uh the bean belt, as you mentioned,
is uh bounded by the tropics of Capricorn and Cancer
and Remiller are running right through the middle. That's right.
And uh the soil climbing and altitude are awesome for coffee.
It means that you're gonna get a continually producing tree,

(16:21):
which is really cool. One coffee tree can have uh
beans ready to pick, beans and bloom flowers blooming all
at the same time. Do you remember we saw them
in Guatemala. Oh yeah, I think it's their second or
third largest export is coffee says their number eight in
the world. Um, I believe it. Uh. So the coffee
is grown on a tree. It's a woody evergreen tree

(16:44):
um that can grow up to thirty ft high. But
if you're into coffee cultivation, you keep your coffee shrub
level so you can harvest it easier. You don't want
to be bringing ladders in there now. And most harvesting
is done by hand. Um. Like you said, the it's
it's constantly productive. So you've got a little bit over
here that's mature. You've got a little bit that's ready. Um,

(17:05):
And there's flowers. Did you know the coffee tree has
flowers that smell like jasmine some say. And on the
spot where those flowers bloomed, about a year later, you're
going to have fully mature red coffee cherries is what
they're called. Right for the picking, and they look just
like cherries they except group in bunches. It tastes different. Um.

(17:27):
And then one tree in a single season, I thought
this was this is kind of staggering. Just one tree
produces one to one and a half pounds, which is
um less than it's about a half a kilogram. Yeah,
that's one. That's a that that takes a lot of
trees to produce all the coffee that the world's consuming.
Thing about that. Luckily we have Bob Bob Boudhan who

(17:51):
got coffee out of Saudi Arabia. That varieties of coffee, Josh,
we already mentioned Arabica. There are two Arabic and Robusta. Um,
if you're talking Arabica, those are the original Ethiopian UH
coffee trees or descendants of UH. They grow well, I'm
sorry they are mild and aromatic. Eventually, that's what you're

(18:13):
gonna get when you drink a cup of it. About
seventy percent of the world's coffee as Arabica growing higher
altitudes between two and six thousand feet above sea level
the Ethiopian Highlands is a great pleasure. Mild temperatures are
required between sixty and seventy five degrease fahrenheit, and they
need about sixty inches of rain per year in and

(18:37):
frost is no good, no, not at all no, because
if you look at the bean belt, Florida is not
even in it, Like the keys aren't even in the
bean belt, So it's probably rare to get a frost,
if not impossible in the bean belt. The robusta is
you're gonna have a bean smaller and rounder. Overall. The

(18:58):
tree is much hardier because it can grow into temperatures
up to eight degrees fahrenheit and lower altitudes, and it
packs a lot more punch, about fifty more caffeine, and
it's more bitter. And I read somewhere that um robusta
is like has long been considered an inferior type of coffee,

(19:21):
like it's the hardy like redheaded cousin of Arabica. It's
on um and that we we here in America consume.
We we consume a lot of it um. And the
reason why is because the Pan American Coffee Council, I believe,
which created something called the coffee break. Have you heard

(19:44):
of that? Check? Yes, that's a made up thing. From
the nineteen fifties, um coffee was coming down from up
on high where only the wealthy could afford it, to
um being a lot more predominant. And one of the
ways that it was um it was introduced to wider
cultures by mixing the inferior robusts of beans with the

(20:06):
Arabica beans. And so now it was like, sure it
doesn't taste as good, but it gets you going through
your your horrible life. So have a have a coffee
break and get back in there. We drink more of
the robusta here. At least in the twentieth century we
started consuming a lot more of it, all right, Yeah, Uh.

(20:28):
There are more than eight hundred flavor characteristics and a
coffee bean which is double that of wine. So when
you hear people talk about wine and all the you know,
it's smokey, oky and woody like double that. And you
know wine people, which I'm a wine person, but I'm not.
I know you're making fun of yourself. I'm making fun

(20:50):
of my people, but wine, I'm sorry. Double that. And
you've got the what you've got going on with coffee,
even though you think you like there's like the morning blend,
little Colombian, little Brazilian. Yeah, not so. Remember our friend
Brandon was having a fight with our friend mark over
because he keeps buying um flavored coffee like the blueberries.

(21:12):
Seberry coffee should not exist. Marker is going to go
ahead and tell you that right now. And not only
should it not exist, but if you make some in
your coffee maker, you might as will throw it away
because you can taste it for the next fifty pots
of coffee. Right, let's talk about the actual coffee bean itself, Chuckers,
the coffee cherry, Josh, all right, what you got is

(21:34):
a bright red, like we said, skin when it's ready
to pick in ripe, Uh, it's green if it's not.
And apparently coffee pickers they don't want to have more
than two green per every one picked, otherwise they're going
to get their hands slapped by coffee plantation owner. Oh yeah, yeah,

(21:54):
like when they're hand picking them, they I mean they're
picking them fast, so you're gonna have some green ones.
But that's their goal, is what I here. The skin
of the cherry is called the exocarp, very thick and bitter.
You got a fruit beneath that called the mesocarp. It's
kind of like the inside of a grape, like if
you peel the skin off a grape. That's what I
take the mesocarpe. Yeah, it's gushy and sweet. Uh. Then

(22:16):
you have the parencoma, which is uh slimy, and it's
a honey like layer protects the bean. There's gonna be
two beans generally, and every you know, if all goes
well in every cherry, and they are covered by a
parchment like envelope called the endocarp. They're kind of bluish
green at the time. And then there's the silver skin

(22:39):
on top of the bean and it's all protecting that
little nugget that looks sort of like a shelled peanut.
And the silver skins also called the spermaderm prefer silver skin.
I think everybody serves prefer silver skin. So uh, if
you can get rid of all these layers that protect
the bean. UM. They sically, what you're going down to

(23:01):
is like the pit of a cherry, the seed, the nut,
that's where the gold is right. Um. And when you
harvest them, you said that people they just want the
bright red ones. But people are harvesting between one and
two hundred pounds a day by hand. Most coffee harvesting
takes place by hand. UM. And it depends on where

(23:23):
you are where it's going to be harvested um or
when it's going to be harvested. If you are north
of the equator, you're going to harvest between September and March.
If you're south of the equator, you're going to um
harvest between April and May, which is not spring. Right,
So the summertime it's basically the only time they're not harvesting.

(23:45):
And when you um, when you've got them harvested, you've
got them picked, you have your hundred to two hundred
pounds for the day. UM. Depending on the type of
coffee plantation, you're going to um dry them by one
of two methods. There's basically just two methods of dry
which is pretty cool considering that they are huge, huge,
concerns that like produce coffee. Yeah, and and there's still

(24:09):
like two kind of primitive means of drying them before
we get into the cool method. I want to point
out that all of this is speed is key because
the freshness of coffee is the secret to good coffee.
So if you pick beans that morning, they're being process
that afternoon. They don't sit around in barrels for a
few days at all, unless they're being dried. Then they

(24:31):
sit around for seven to ten that's part of the processing.
So basically, um, if you're using the dry method of drying, um,
you are basically you're laying the coffee beans out in
the sun or the coffee cherries I'm sorry, big concrete slab.
You're laying them out in the sun, um, and you're
letting them dry. Uh. And after about seven to ten days, um,

(24:55):
and you're raking them periodically, just kind of turn them
over and get some air underneath them. The uh, the
cherries will have dried enough so that there's only about
eleven percent moisture in the whole coffee cherry. And um,
you can tell that it's ready because the beans rattle inside.
So it makes a good children's toy as well. I
couldn't find who dries dry like I'm sure you can

(25:16):
find out, like whatever coffee if you want to really
want to research what kind of coffee you want to drink, Well, yeah,
I'm sure you can tell, like who does the dry method,
because it's I mean, I get the feeling that dry
methods probably superior because anything that usually takes a little longer,
it's probably worth it. Sure. And also it doesn't use
enzymes like the wet method. I get the impression that, um,
if you get from a small plantation, probably using the

(25:39):
dry method. The wet method uses enzymes and fermentation. And
basically you take the cherries and throw them into a
vat of water. After I'm sorry you you get the
pulp and skin peeled away. Then you throw it into
a vat to ferment for a couple of days, and um,
the natural enzymes apparently eat away the little envelope in

(26:00):
the silver skin and then you have the beans left over.
That's right. But and you still need to dry up
for about four days in the sun, just like the
dry method. And uh, you let it rest at night
sometimes if you don't want to do if you want
to speed it up even more. You don't do the
sun dry method. You put it in these big rotating
drums that pump in hot air. Uh, and that'll dry

(26:21):
it out. Uh. And it's spermating. But if it smells
too much like vinegar, that means of spermating too much,
is there? Right? Yeah, that's what I hear. Okay, So
let's say you have a bunch of dry coffee. What
you have is a commodity, like we said, second only
to oil and total dollars traded. And uh, it's called
green coffee because coffee producers don't roast coffee. Roasters roast

(26:41):
the coffee and they buy their green coffee from coffee producers.
So you've got Um, if you bought a bunch of
green coffee, what you would have is traditionally a big
jute or cecil bag filled with coffee. Still is this day? Yeah? Um,
and uh it's going to be train. It'sward to the
tune of about seven million tons of green coffee shift

(27:04):
worldwide every year. Now it's already hold too at this point,
right right, it's just the beans, right Yeah. So the
hauling process, you know, it's a it's a machine that
does that and then they sort them according to to class,
like grade A beans, Grade BE beans. Great sin about
that part, yes, but eventually you're going to get a
nice bean, right, And they grade them first by size

(27:25):
and then by density. And you want the bigger, heavier
ones are superior to the smaller ones. And either they're
graded by hand like along and like a conveyor belt,
or there's um a conveyor belt and puffs of air
that will puff off the lighter, smaller ones. Yeah, or
they have little machines like uh, disorders that sort of
according to size. There's all different kinds of machines. Now, yes,

(27:47):
they also have ones that look exactly like giant spiders
that are terrifying, but they get the job done all right.
Now to the roasting, which is that's the good stuff. Yeah,
that's where coffee really gets its u a roma and
its flavor, eventual flavor. Uh. And here's an interesting fact.
Roasting reduces caffeine. Is that right? That's right. So even

(28:10):
though an espresso roast takes fourteen minutes compared to a
seven minute light American roast, an espresso bean has a
lot less caffeine than just a regular thing, a regular bean. Huh,
so you may say, why do you get so jacked up?
It's because the grind and the concentrated brew. Yeah, I

(28:34):
never knew that. I thought the espresso bean is like
loaded with extra caffeine. I guess I would have. I
would have imagined the same thing, because you quite like
taste with caffeine content too. Yeah. True. So like the blacker,
it is the thicker and richer that tastes you just
like this must be loaded with caffeine. Very interesting, chuckers.
So we're roasting now. Yeah, So you've got roasting drum

(28:56):
um that's capable of achieving temperatures of degrees fair height,
which is two degrees celsius and um. The key is
not just the heat, but the rotation of the drums. Um.
You can roast coffee at that heat as long as
it's moving, so it won't burn. I don't want to burn.
It's hot, but it's not gonna burn. Espresso beans are

(29:17):
burned a little bit, right. Um. So there's there's a
couple of If you are a coffee roaster, you're you're
looking for a couple of things. The first thing is
that the beans should start to turn yellow, smell a
little bit like popcorn. Like you said, they shouldn't smell
like vinegar at all. You want to throw that out, um,
And then you're going to hear something called the pop

(29:37):
and the coffee bean is just popped and it's hit
about four hundred degrees ferret height. It doubles in size
at that point. Yeah. Um, And that's really the beginning
of the real roasting process. After that happens, you really
want to be Johnny on the Spot paying attention to
this because things move pretty fast after that. Um. Through
a process called pyrolysis. Um, the heat extracts the oil

(30:00):
and they turn the coffee from green or yellow to
a nice, rich brown, And now it's really being roast
and eventually almost a black. Yeah. It depends like like
you said, if you are going to make espresso roast,
you're gonna heat it for fourteen minutes and basically you're
toasting these things. You're burning them, and the sugars inside

(30:22):
are caramelizing. Right. And by the way, God help you
if you say espresso, or even worse, if you sell
espresso and you have a sign that says espresso, come
on and then chuck. There's the second pop, and the
second pop is like I'm done, take me out. Uh.
You talked about the roasters, these roastmasters, and they are

(30:45):
called roastmasters because it is a very specialized job. What
they do a lot of times is because you don't
want to roast you know, ten thousand beans and have
a bad batch. So what they'll do is they have
a side room where they a little tiny batch and
this is where the roastmaster does their taste testing. They'll

(31:05):
brew up four cups of coffee from different parts of
the batch just to make sure they've covered it all. Uh.
They push aside the phone, and when they don't put
it in a coffee maker, they put the grounds in
a cup with hot water and let's steep, you know,
like old school. Yeah, that's how I make coffee or
what I like to call camping style. Do you do
that at home? Uh? Yeah, you just boil it with
the French press, Oh, French pressure. I have several ways.

(31:29):
There's all. I also have this coffee maker that you
may got me. The boat them and it uses vacuum.
It uses the vacuum to suck water up into this
top bulb and it just sits there and percolates and
then it drips back down really, but just the coffee
does the ground stay up above, and then you take
the top part off and you've got like a little
pot of coffee. It's awesome. It's fun to watch. I

(31:51):
find the de press pot is a little chalky for
my taste. Oh yeah, it totally is. But I guess
it's just you know, if you like that, you like it,
but you have to you have to grind it to
its right. Yeah, which we'll talk about in a second.
It's all about the ground, Josh. But what they do is,
like I said, they've got the small batch. They broke
the four cups. They steep it and then they push
aside the foam on the surface to release a roma,

(32:11):
and that's called breaking the cup. They sniff it. Then
they skim the grounds from the surface and do a
little sip and spit for each cup, and then they say, hey,
it's ready, go ahead and throw the big batch. And
then when no one's looking, they snort the grounds. That's right.
And another interesting thing is that once they roasted, it
actually gets packaged still hot into the bag hot, and

(32:35):
they pump in nitrogen to replace the oxygen. And because
you don't want oxygen and then uh that you know,
the vacuum seals. Yeah, oxygen degrades the freshness of coffee
faster than anything else. So yeah, that's why everything's vacuum sealed. Well,
let's go. We're there. So uh well, there's four keys
to making really good coffee. Right, You've got your roasted coffee.

(32:58):
It's been roasted masterfully. Um. And now it's your turn.
You have a bag of beans that's vacuum sealed, very fresh.
You can still tell it's warm even chuck um. And
so you have four things you want to take into consideration. Freshness,
the type of the grind, the ratio of water to coffee,
and then water purity and the purity of your coffee maker.

(33:19):
And by the way, don't don't either a buy ground
coffee or be buy coffee and grind it in the store.
You're you're not doing yourselves any favors if you can,
and tell everybody just leave you alone while you enjoy
your coffee. Do whatever you want people. But if you're
a coffee connoisseur, yeah, and you're not doing that. You're grinding.
You have a home grinder, you're buying beans, you have

(33:40):
a home grinder and you're grinding just enough to make
a couple of cups of coffee. Well, and not only
do you have a home grinder, but you should have
a nice grinder. I went to research Emily drinks a
latte every morning of her life, and she had a
crappy little grinder and a crappy espresso machine. So I
invested in like the good stuff in The difference between

(34:01):
the fifteen dollar grinder and the hundred dollar grinder is massive,
I would imagine. So, yes, grinder, I've heard burg grinders
are like the best one. It's a burg grinder, and um,
it's you know, I don't know enough about coffee to
know the difference, but I started reading up on it
and it said the grind is the key. Yeah, So

(34:23):
as you say, the grind is the key, you've got
your freshness. You don't want coffee that's older than like
two weeks. You don't want to grind it ahead of time. Um,
and if you do end up somehow with some ground coffee,
you want to keep it in the fridge and it
will stay up to two weeks. Don't try to get
Chuck Bryant to drink any of it, though, No I'm
not like that. I'll drink anything. I'm just teaching. But
the grind, like you say, is what releases all of

(34:45):
the flavors and aromas and every little, great little nugget
of goodness and coffee. It's the way you grind it.
And anybody who's ever ground coffee, especially at like a
Trader Joe's or something, you can adjust then die and
it will say French press, espresso, automatic drip and espressoes

(35:06):
are really fine grind very and Turkish is actually even
finer than that. UM. But the grind is related to
the amount of time it takes to make the coffee.
So espresso is very fine, almost powdery, and that takes
about twenty five seconds to make espresso. It takes about
ten minutes to make a pot of UM regular drip coffee.

(35:28):
So for that you have a coarser grind is what
it's called. UM. And then also, Chuck, I want to
mention there's Cowboy coffee. You're talking about how the roastmaster
um just mashes up some coffee that called Cowboy coffee.
Cowboy coffee. Yeah, Um, And apparently it used to be
very difficult for cookie to get anybody to grind coffee

(35:50):
because that gets sold very very often. So um, I
believe in the nineteenth century there was a coffee company
called art Buckles Coffee, and they put a peppermintstick and
every bag of coffee so that cookie could be like, hey,
whoever grinds this gets really stick and yeah, apparently cookie
had no trouble after that. That's a great story job.
I agree, I love it. So you talked about proportion

(36:11):
of water to coffee. Everyone has their slight variations. Some
people like a little stronger, some people like a little weaker. Yeah.
I found this this ratio to be on, to be wanting,
because what we have here in this article is two
tablespoons of ground coffee for six ounces of water. They
say that makes a strong cut, but you say more.
I like a little more coffee than that, a little more,

(36:33):
which is like a heaping kitchen spoon, no kitten spoons,
about one table spoon two of those? Yeah, that's what
I mean. Yeah, yes, heaping for sure. Yeah yeah, oh yeah,
you know you don't level it off. You're like, if
it if it doesn't fall off on the way into
the basket or the French press, right, okay. And they
also say that cold water. Fresh cold water is what

(36:56):
you really want to start with, and eventually you want
to end up with two grease fahrenheit ninety three celsius.
If you want to really get all the flavor out
of the beans and keep your maker clean, gotta clean
the thing out. Well, there's the irony. If your coffee
smells like vinegar, you've got bad coffee. But you want
to use a vinegar solution to clean out your coffee

(37:17):
every once in a while, rent it out. I don't
know what the proportion is make it up. I think
if yeah, there, I mean, there's got to be a
certain amount of weeks or amount of coffee pots of brood.
But if you're starting to taste bitter coffee, then it's
it's time. Or if you taste blueberry coffee and you
want to do the vinegar thing to or throw it out.
And then we talked about the Madagascar coffee species um

(37:39):
that naturally produces decaf but um, most people don't drink this. Instead,
they're drinking stuff that um has been removed somehow. The
caffeine has been removed from the beans, either by using
a chemical solvent gross which extracts the caffeine and then
the solvents washed away. Wow. Uh. And then the other

(38:02):
method is to steam the beans nice and um. That
gets some of the outer part of the bean um,
which apparently packs the most caffeine worn away, and you've
got decalf and then I think they scrape the rest
of it a way after that even. Yeah. So if
you're if you're into healthy, then get organic decaf. If

(38:22):
you want decaf non chemical solvent. Yah, you don't want
to be drinking that, yeah. Um So then coffee around
the world Chuck America. Thank you to UM our friends
at Starbucks who founded their company in nineteen seventy one.
UM has kind of come out of its haze of
not that great coffee, and it's starting to understand like, oh,

(38:45):
there's really good coffee out there, and it's it's a
good coffee because I've heard I've heard coffee people say,
you know, store Bucks really need a good coffee because X,
Y and Z. I was trying to be polite here
and I was thinking Starbucks of nine not Starbucks of
two thousand eleven. UM Starbucks opened America up to the

(39:05):
concept of good coffee. Doesn't necessarily serve it good coffee
or at least expensive coffee, right. Um. But for the
most part, Americans still prefer the American roast, which is
about a seven minute roast, like you said, um, which
is just shameful if you ask me. So what do
you think though, I mean, I'm not an officio, were

(39:26):
talking about this, Well, I don't know. I mean I
just hear coffee snobs say, you know, store Bucks isn't
even good. But then I think those are people that
are just fighting the big mass corporation that's on every corner. Well,
I don't know, man, I I tend to go with
the coffee snobs in that one. I think it used
to be a lot about like way, there's way too
many Starbucks out there, and now I think it's like

(39:47):
they're just not The coffee just doesn't taste that good.
It's really cloying. But the thing is is, I wonder
also if I'm missing something, because how does Starbucks not
know that it's coffee tastes like this? Why wouldn't they
change it? What's the deal. I'm sure someone out there
We're gonna get some good emails on this from people
who really know how they treat their beans. From Ted
Starbuck himself, it's gonna be like I'm so you, Teddy

(40:10):
Starbuck France Prince roast, very dark, robust cafe l it's
gonna be half milk, half coffee. I don't know why
you'd want to ruin your coffee with half milk. It's good,
is it? Yeah? Viennese roast, I think Vienna was the first.
I think the first coffee shop in Europe was in Vienna.

(40:32):
I might be wrong that I can't remember. I think so.
I think so. Possibly we'll find out at any rate.
The Viennese roast is very popular. Um dark roads two
thirds dark roast beans one third regular roast, and the
European roast is the flip the reverse of those. So
it's one third dark and two thirds light. Yes. Uh.

(40:54):
And then of course you have espresso um, which, like
you said, it's there's less caffeine, but you get the
big jolt out of it by grinding it. So just
pulverizing every hiding place where caffeine can hang. Have you
ever seen maholland drive David Lynch the espresso seen, I
don't remember it. It's when they it's some one of

(41:17):
those mysterious meetings and David Lynch movies or like, who
are these people and why are they having this mysterious meeting?
And they serve this one guy. He's like, you know,
we searched the world over for this espresso, and we
know you're gonna approve of this one. And they surf
into the guy and he drinks it and then spits
it up and a nap. So good god, he's the

(41:38):
best Turkish roast. What's what's the proverb that coffee should
be black as hell, strong as death, sweet as love,
So what does that mean? They just put a lot
of sugar in it. They like it sweet? Oh, I
think it's way. I think it's more than that. So
they have um, carter mom and chicory and coriander in
their coffee. Um. They also have you ever had like

(42:00):
Mexican coffee or Mexican chocolate coffee with like cinnamon and um,
like cayenne pepper in it, and I don't know, very
good um. And then yes, they also put some some
sugar in there, I believe. And it's very finely ground,
like I said, even more finely ground than espresso. Boy,
that's powdery. Yeah, and thick. They make it real thick yeah. Yeah.

(42:23):
Uh in Cuba, You're gonna get the Cafe Cubano, which
you do it like a shot, which is pretty cool,
and it's like espresso, but you don't sip it with
your uh sambuca lemon twist or whatever. Have you ever
had a lemon twist with espresso? I never have no
remember Balky in um Beverly Hills cop he said, can

(42:47):
I interest you in in? Yeah? Yeah? Uh? And then
in Thailand, I didn't realize this coffee is really strong
there and it is chickeny tinged, iced and sweetened with
condensed milk. I don't know if they don't drink hot
coffee at all, or I know it's in Japan. It's
like coffee is huge, and I think it's always hot
in Thailand and they're like, it's too hot for hot coffee.

(43:08):
It is so apparently if you want to make it
a home, you just take some coffee, a little sweet
and condensed milk and some ice and there's your thaie coffee. Boom,
so chuck. I am heartened by some recent research that
has come to light that basically says, drink as much
coffee as you like. Yeah. They I mean they used

(43:28):
to say like coffee is bad for you. You don't
want to have too much right now, bowlic acid, too
much caffeine will make you go shoot people. I mean,
it's been crazy. There's good and bad. Let's just say that.
So let's talk about some there's some sort of weird
link between coffee consumption and UM diabetes. There's a negative correlation,
whereas the more coffee you drink, the lower your risk

(43:50):
of diabetes, right two diabetes specifically. Yeah, they did nine
studies about five years ago, and four to six cups
of coffee per day versus two or less us reduced
your risk by which is pretty significant. Yeah, that's extremely
significant thirty if you drink more than six cups a day,

(44:10):
all right, and whether you drink decaf or caffeinated, the
results were the same. Yeah. So it's not the caffeine,
which I thought was probably the bullock acid. We're gonna
do a caffeine podcast by the way. Okay, that's coming um.
Free radicals, which may or may not exist. UM. Supposedly
there's phytochemicals about a thousand of them uh in coffee

(44:30):
beans and UH. If free radicals do exist, these phytochemicals
act as antioxidants. Preventing the aging process and all sorts
of cellular damage if free radicals exist. Uh. They say
that coffee improves memory and cognition. They did plenty of
studies on this, and coffee drinkers people that drink coffee
in the morning especially performed better than non drinkers and

(44:53):
when it comes to learning new information. Yeah, I was
surprised by this. Like I'm not surprised, but I wonder
if they did a follow up, like four hours later,
like how you doing now? Exactly? Yeah, the coffee crash,
I get that. Which is I think white people like
my brother in law drink coffee all day long. Yeah,

(45:14):
there is no coffee crash when you drink two pots today. No,
I know what you mean. But you also don't sleep
and like your calf muscles rupture through your skin. They
don't study on that. I can tell you, all right,
what about the bad? Because you know not not not
everything is all good. Um. Well, when you drink a
lot of coffee, you pee calcium, and uh that means

(45:37):
that you are losing bone density e g. Coffee can
increase OSTEO process. But they say add a little milk
to your coffee, balance it out. Oh yeah, that's what.
That's what it says here at least, it definitely makes
sense or yogurt, But who wants to eat yogurt? So
if you put two I love yogurt. I'm just kidding,
all like it, all right? Two tablespoons of only the

(45:58):
good stuff, like only Greek yogurt. Um, two tablespoons of
milk or yogurt per cup of coffee. I don't see
putting yogurt in coffee though, Like you'd have to be
literally insane to do that. It seems like it would
just coagulate, ump up, like they would take you away
and lock you up if somebody saw you putting yogurt
in your coffee. Josh, I know you like your skin.

(46:20):
I know you like to remain youthful and and handsome
and sexy. But it's just like an exercise and futility.
I feel like I disagree. Coffee has antioxidants. If you
drink it too much of it, it will cause your
skin to wrinkle, probably quicker than your average dude who
doesn't because of dehydration. That's what they say. I've heard that.

(46:41):
I don't know about this weight gain thing. Um. Basically,
there's a change in blood sugar that the caffeine high
can produce, which is strange because that would seem to
um contradict the diabetes study if there was a less
risk less of a risk of diabetes. Huh um. But apparently, um,

(47:04):
if we we because we love eating donuts with our
coffee and that kind of thing too. Um. You can
actually gain weight if you eat a lot of coffee
because you're like, I would have another crowler? Why not?
Because it goes do you dunk? I have dunked in
the past. I'm not that big on it. I I

(47:26):
also will dunk in oreo from time to time, but
it's not like every time any oreos, I have to
have milk. I thought you oreon coffee, okay? Uh. And
then coffee is one of the most heavily sprayed crops
on the planet, with pesticides and herbicides and chemicals. So
if you know, if you're not into that, you should
get organic coffee. Thank you, Norman Borlog. And just a

(47:47):
couple of more little facts here. I'm gonna skip most
of these, but um, I will say that fair trade coffee,
if you have a heart, you will seek out fair
trade coffee because for every I'm sorry. The pickers themselves
earned as little as four cents per pound, and the
farmer earns as little as twelve cents per pounds sold.

(48:11):
So the fair trade movement tries to redistribute profits so
that all these people earn decent wages. I believe the
fair trade movement originated around coffee production, like I think
that was the first industry. I think that's where it's
cradle lie. And finally, Josh, if you are one of
those dudes or ladies who start your day off by

(48:34):
going to your local coffee shop to get a cup
of coffee on your way to work, you're gonna wait
in line about forty five hours a year for that coffee.
Not too bad a couple of days. That's a lot, though. Uh.
You're also going to drop about a hundred and sixty
five bucks on coffee every year. I don't know that
seems that to me looks like a stat if you

(48:56):
buy and make your own coffee, Because I bought one
of those gingerbread ones yesterday at Starbucks. It was like five,
let's even say four bucks, and you drink coffee every day,
you buy one a day. There's plenty of people out
there by cups of coffee. That's more than a thousand
dollars on coffee a year. That's way low. Then, yeah,

(49:19):
that's just a stupid statistic you came up with. I'm
done with my coffee, We're done with a podcast. Well, no,
we're not quite done yet. They got some stuff, chuck.
Let's forego listener mail and instead, sure, we're not gonna
just let you go before we let everybody go. Um,
we want to wish everyone a very happy New Year. Yeah,
no matter where you are, no matter what time it is,

(49:42):
we are um wishing you a very very happy, safe, bountiful, beautiful,
wonderful two thou twelve. Yeah, and that's what I love
about New Year is it's everyone We're not going to
get a malc and well you know in my country
we don't do this or down here, it's not that
everyone gets a New Year. So you must really love
New Year's. Love it? Yeah, so Mary Mary, New Year.

(50:04):
And I want to also say very very special happy
birthday to a very very special girl who um has
her birthday the two days before New Year's. Myum, I
was assuming that, well, happy birthday. We love, Happy birthday
you me and happy New Year to everybody and if
you I forgot almost chuck. If you want to get

(50:26):
in touch with this, you can tweet to us at
s Y s K podcast, Facebook dot com, slash stuff
you Should Know, and you can send us a good
old fashioned happy New Year email to Stuff Podcast at
how stuff works dot com. For more on this and
thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.

(50:48):
To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast
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