YOUR COFFEE IS NOT AS NICE AS MY COFFEE, BUT I HAVE A SOLUTION TO YOUR PROBLEM

For sake of argument, this panda’s drinking coffee.

Hello. You’re doing coffee wrong.

You’re drinking Arabica beans, probably. 80% of the coffee drunk around the world comes from the coffea arabica plant. Virtually all the rest come from the coffea robusta. Robusta has a little more caffeine, but a more bitter taste. It tends to be used as filler in coffee ‘blends’, but it’s the main coffee bean used in Vietnamese coffee. That’s (the main reason) why Vietnamese coffee tastes different.

Coffee originated in Ethiopia, all commercial coffee plants are descendants of ones from Ethiopia. But Ethiopia has far more than just two types of coffee plant. There are possibly hundreds of them, and very few of them are cultivated … abbayesii, benghalensis, congensis, dybowski, eugenoides, fadenii … there are whole alphabets of varieties. The reason not all of them are cultivated is that, well, not all of them taste very nice.

One that is very nice indeed is Liberica.

Less than 1% of coffee grown is from the liberica plant. The liberica tree is much taller than the others, its beans are larger.Here are what the various coffee beans look like:

Source

It is grown commercially in very few places in the world – basically a handful of farms in a couple of provinces (Batangas and Cavite) in the Phillippines.

Some people don’t like the taste. There is a word for those people, and it’s very rude, so let’s substitute the word ‘wrong’. Those people are wrong.

What does it taste like? Coffee, but somehow more delicate than you’re used to, with a subtle taste that people have identified as ‘nutty’ or ‘blueberry’. In hot coffee, there’s a sort of cinnamon, spicy note to it. The taste changes as it cools.

It tastes of coffee, but nicer. It’s essentially the coffee they’d drink in Narnia.

As cold brew coffee, it tastes different again … there’s almost a whisky flavour to it.

(How to make cold brew coffee the extremely easy way: put an equal volume of coffee grind and water in a container, seal it, put it in the fridge for about 18 hours. Strain it. Put the liquid back in the fridge for at least twelve hours. You can probably make coffee from the sludge left in the sieve. The liquid is concentrated to about espresso level. When it’s ready, you can drink a shot neat, pour nearly-boiling water on it to make regular coffee, and it’s the only way to make actual iced coffee).

And here’s the time for the call to action: this coffee is so rare that the very few plantations where it’s grown aren’t sure it’s commercially viable. Unless you buy some of this coffee, now, the species may go extinct. And then, if you don’t buy this coffee, you will be as morally culpable for the extinction of a whole species as you would be if you went around strangling pandas.

So, don’t be a moral monster, do your bit for the planet, and give the ridiculously poncey coffee I drink a try. Heirloom Coffee sell it. I have not been paid by them to say that. Hmmmm … I should have asked about that beforehand, I bet they’d have thrown me a couple of bags in exchange for the plug. Damn.

Thank you.