Saturday 12 October 2019

A Return To The Bad Old Day's Of Coffee

Back in the 80s coffee was a thick, bitter, brown liquid which came in granules or a syrup like substance which you stirred into hot water and would leave a thick ring around the top of the mug which you would have to scrub with a brillo pad to remove.
Before it became known as a Cafe au Lait or a Latte, my coffee of choice was a coffee made with milk and as we moved through the millennium years, drinking coffee became more fashionable and especially drinking coffee outside as pavement cafes became a thing as the likes of Starbucks and Costa took coffee drinking to a new level and away from chipped mugs and a choice between Nescafe or something the owner found in the back of the shelf and smelt vaguely like coffee.
Over two billion cups of coffee are drunk every day and science has found it has some beneficial qualities such as a Latte providing 40% of the calcium recommended each day so two of those a day with a yoghurt and you are sorted but the even better news is that a latte also provides 25% daily value of protein and 35% daily value of vitamin D.
Brazil, Vietnam and Colombia are the three biggest producers of the Arabica coffee bean and employ 120 million people but the shrub takes 2 and a half years to grow and are a notoriously difficult crop to grow and climate change is making it even more difficult, Brazil is projected to lose 25% of its suitable land for cultivating the Coffee shrub by 2050 and the quality of the bean is poorer.
There are many species of coffee plant, besides Arabica which is the coffee bean of choice, such as Coffea Robusta which is used for instant blends although it is considered too bitter for most coffee drinkers but is much hardier and can be grown in more places less susceptible to the changing climate.
For us Latte slurping pavement warriors then the choice is more expensive coffee as the preferred Arabica bean becomes more scarce or coffee which is much more reminiscent of the stuff we had back in the 80s.
More expensive coffee then is something else then that we can hang around the neck of the weird Climate Change deniers but also coffee, as it become more popular, has been too successful and those two billion cups drank each day has used up the available resources so if you are new to the coffee drinking regime, please go back to tea or hot chocolate and leave the few beans remaining to us original coffee drinkers who had to wade through years of drinking something called Camp Coffee until the good stuff came along.

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