A coffee by any other process...

  I just know that all of you lie in bed at night in a cold sweat, screaming a burning question at the darkness: "Why does my Sumatran coffee taste so different from my Guatemalan?" I imagine that the response you finally decide upon takes one of two forms: either you would appeal to the character of the soil, or you would suggest the the varietals unique to each region are the major factor. Try to contain yourselves when I say what I'm about to tell you. The answer involves a little of both of these, but the flavors that make coffee truly unique to an area are not in the bean, but in the processing.
  Coffee processing includes pretty much everything that happens to a coffee bean from harvesting to export. It involves, in no particular order, numerous steps to separate the ripe fruit from the unripe and rotten, remove the fruit to retrieve the bean, and dry it before being packaged and shipped.
  There are four major (and a few minor) ways to process coffee: wet processing, dry processing, wet-hulled (also called Giling Basah), and the pulped natural method. Each has a distinctive effect on the flavor of a coffee. This week, I'll go in depth on wet process, and for the next few weeks, I'll compare this with other processing techniques in terms of the steps involved and the resulting taste.
  In wet process coffee production, the coffee cherries are first scanned for rocks, twigs, and other fun stuff, then 'floated' in a vat of water to remove the unripe, overripe, or otherwise defective beans that float to the surface. They are then sent through a pulper. This is a machine specifically designed to remove the outermost part of the coffee to return the seed with some of the fruit still intact. This step is also naturally designed to separate unripe coffee. Unripe coffee cherries are harder than their ripe counterparts, so the machine is finely adjusted to provide the exact amount of pressure to pulp only the ripe cherry. The coffee is briefly fermented for 1-2 days to break down the remaining fruit or 'mucilage' then washed to remove this layer, leaving the bean itself in a layer of parchment. The bean at this point must be dried. High quality coffee is mainly dried in the sun on patios and is raked every half hour or so (for about a week), but mechanical dryers are also common to expedite the final stages of drying. At this stage, the coffee is stored for 30-60 days until it is ready to be dry milled and shipped. Dry milling involves removing the parchment from the coffee, then sorting by density again on a mechanical table. The final stage of coffee processing is to visually inspect all coffee beans to remove anything that looks defective or inconsistent. It is then packed in burlap (or more recently vacuum packed in mylar) and brought to your local roaster to be expertly blended, roasted, and brewed all so you, the consumer, can throw in a mountain of sugar or artificial sweetener and a cow's worth of milk, rush off to whatever stupid meeting you have, failing to even once savor the beverage you possess, and consider yourself a connoisseur, and I detest each and every one of you.
  Ahem, vitriolic diatribes aside, wet process coffee tends to have a very clean, bright, and floral character with an accentuated acidity as compared to other methods of processing. The fruit is not in contact with the bean for as long as other methods, limiting the body and complexity that this would otherwise impart. This process is common to all areas typically associated with very clean flavor profiles, namely Central and South America (with the exception of Brazil. We'll get to that later). As a thought to leave you with, if you process a Sumatra, the Dark Lord of coffee, with this method, it can be almost indistinguishable from a bright, cheerful Central American cup. I don't know how far this article will sway you on the whole 'nature vs. nurture' philosophical discussion, but I hope it leaves you as I tend to be, confounded and befuddled by the ambiguity of human existence.

Costa Rica Helsar Villa Sarchi Solis

Seated a few miles southwest of Volcán Poás, an active stratovolcano, in the Alajuela province of Costa Rica is the village of Sarchi. It is known by most for its artisans, who produce a wide variety of items from small souvenirs to brightly painted oxcarts, a distinctive form of artistic expression in the country. Another distinction this small town has is its cultivation of the Villa Sarchi cultivar. Villa Sarchi is a dwarf mutation of the Bourbon varietal (Bourbon and Typica are the two main Arabica varietals from which all other varietals derive). It is not particularly common, and as far as my limited knowledge goes, it is only grown in Costa Rica.
Situated about five miles north of Sarchi in Llano Bonito de Naranjo, at an elevation of 1600-1700 meters, is the farm of Roger Solis. Today's coffee is a wet process Villa Sarchi from this farm in central Costa Rica. The bean is small with an even color, and it roasts well. The fragrance is reminiscent of rice, whole grains, almonds, and molasses, with sweet floral notes, and subtle mint. This doesn't change much when water is added, but the aromas sweeten, and the floral, minty character is brought to the fore. The cup itself is medium bodied and has a well-balanced body and acidity with a nice bitterness and a creamy finish. As it begins to cool, this coffee evolves significantly. The bitterness tapers off, the coffee smooths out, and it begins to exhibit a pleasing tartness and a pretty convincing grapefruit finish. A great coffee overall for hanging out down by the oxcart.

In the beginning...

I've decided that in addition to my weekly tasting notes, I'll provide an additional article dealing with science, history, culture, and modern issues all related to coffee. I figured there would be no better place to start than with its discovery.
Like all good things, the discovery of coffee is so very shrouded in myth and alternative retellings that no one actually knows what the hell happened. I'll start by recounting the more popular mythologies associated with its discovery, then move on to what modern research is able to tell us.
Stories concerning the origin of coffee were originally mentioned by the Arabic physician Abd al Qadir Al Jaziri in a 1587 manuscript. This manuscript was translated into French by Antoine Galland (De l'origine et du progrès du Café. Sur un manuscrit arabe de la Bibliothèque du Roy, 1699). This manuscript documents coffee from its origins in Yemen through its spread throughout the Middle East. It provides a story on the origin of coffee steeped in Islamic tradition.
In this document, the discovery of coffee was attributed to Sheik Hadji Omar in the year 1278 AD, a follower of Sheik Abou'l hasan Schadheli, the legendary founder of the city of Mocha, or Al-Makha. A version of the story states that Sheik Omar was a healer, and his prayers were requested from the leader of Al-Makha. His daughter became ill with the plague (probably an addition of Abd al Qadir. This would suggest the early 14th century AD, and coffee may be referenced in medical texts much earlier). After healing her, he attempted to steal away from the city with her, prompting his immediate exile. While wandering near the mountain Ousab, Omar saw a majestic bird perched on the branch of a tree, and interpreted it as an omen of his master, Schadheli. He ate of the fruit and recognized its revitalizing effects. The idea then came to him to boil the fruit and make tea. Alternate versions of the story suggest that he attempted to improve the taste of the berries by roasting the beans, then accidentally came upon the beverage by attempting to soften the roasted beans in water (Persia is usually credited with the invention of coffee roasting). He returned to the town and was immediately accepted on the merits of the new beverage he had discovered.
A story that appeared much later than Adb al Qadir's manuscript is the commonly heard story of the goatherd Kaldi. The first mention of this story comes from the year 1671 in France. The story is most commonly located in Ethiopia or Egypt. A goatherd tended to notice that his goats were much more 'frolicsome' after eating the berries of a specific tree. He then told an abbott (dervish) of the local monastery about this. The abbott tried these berries and appreciated the effects so greatly that he introduced the monastery to it. The French author Edelstan Jardin, in an attempt to place himself solidly at the forefront of opium-induced hallucinations, added to the story that the goats raised up on two feet and danced with the goatherd Kaldi, and that upon seeing this, a monk, setting aside the tendency to run screaming, go lay down for a while, or just burn somebody at the stake, gladly approached him to inquire about the nature of the event, thereby providing the monastic order a tool for particularly rough nights of prayer and recitation. The grain of truth in this story is that, in fact, coffee was a very popular beverage with religious institutions, both Islamic and, later, Christian (And oddly enough, was often proscribed under penalty of harm or death by Islamic and Christian leaders).
Some even more imaginative Europeans have suggested for instance that the nepenthe Helen mixes into wine in the Odyssey is juice from the coffee berry, or that several biblical references to certain plants were references to coffee. In this particularly murky realm of folk history, it has been very difficult to tease out details concerning the origin of coffee's consumption.
So here's what we do know. Coffee clearly evolved in Africa. That much is certain. Arabica (Caffea arabica) is a hybrid of Robusta (Caffea canephora) and Caffea eugeniodia, a much lower caffeine variant. Both of these coffee varieties trace their roots to Africa, with Ethiopia providing a staggering amount of genetic diversity in Arabica specimens (resulting in Ethiopian coffee's tendency to taste a bit wild and unexpected). It is also accepted that this hybridization may have occurred fairly recently, though considering that I haven't found any information to quantify 'fairly recently', I can't provide a solid estimate of what this means. This may (<-MAY!) support the idea that Arabica and Robusta were both originally discovered in Ethiopia, and their use was passed on first to the port city of Mocha in Yemen, and then on to Mecca, Persia, Constantinople, and the world. Interestingly enough, this was also an idea that Edelestan Jardin offered (I'm sure completely coincidentally) along with his psychedelic origin story.
Now go, my children. Caffeinate.