Английский ЕГЭ - банк заданий - страница 251
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An end to second-hand coffee
To the naked eye, this farm is just like any other. But it doesn’t take long to realise that the farm of Jesus Martin, though not huge, is anything but ordinary.
Martin grew up like many others in the Santa Ana Valley –– known as the Coffee Triangle of Colombia –– on a coffee farm owned by his father and grandfather. “I am the youngest of six children and we all worked the farm,” Martin said. “My parents focused their energies on teaching us the agricultural trade, but also the love behind it.” Despite this great dedication to coffee and respect for his family business, he ended up pursuing a different career altogether: law and business management. It didn’t come easy to him as coffee was never far away.
During every visit to his family’s humble farm, the rich aromas of beans roasting and the smell of his mother’s carrot cake caused his heart to beat faster. Coffee was his life, and in 2004, after years practicing law, he found a way to combine his legal knowledge, business education and family’s lifeline into what he called “the coffee dream project”.
Despite growing some of the most coveted beans in the world, most Colombians have never even tasted the Colombian coffee that is renowned around the world. Instead, local people drink what they call “second-hand coffee”, which is made from berries that haven't fully ripened, have been over-roasted or even infected with insects and diseases. Like most businesses in struggling economies, the farmers only make profits on exports –– so they save their best stuff for higher paying countries. “Farming coffee for a profit is very challenging,” Martin explained, tossing a few berries in his hand. “The coffee trade intermediaries, exporters, roasters and big multinational companies are the ones that benefit the most in the coffee-trade chain.” Martin’s dream project, however, was to turn this process around, bringing specialty coffee back to Colombia.
The project, however, was a total surprise for his family. “When I first informed them, they told me I was crazy, they said it was a wild goose chase.”
Even with his background in farming, starting the project from the ground up was difficult. Convincing his workers to focus on quality was his biggest concern; most only cared about quantity since their wage was dependent on how many beans they picked. Martin recalled many hours, days and weeks training local farmers to understand the process, from the colours of the raw berries to the smell and taste of the beans once they’d been dried and sorted.
Once the farmers understood the importance of quality, it was onto phase two: bring the roasting process in-house, instead of paying for the beans to be roasted elsewhere. Buying his own roaster –– one of the only five in the entire country –– was expensive, but the purchase offered a huge saving in roasting, packaging and exporting costs.
By 2008, his passion started to pay off; he opened his flagship store Café Jesus Martin in Salento. The shop and its team of trained baristas, Martin said, have done much to teach the locals about enjoying specialty coffee. The look on their face when they take their first sip is what keeps him motivated. “They are reacting so positively; they’re discovering something entirely different than what they’re used to consuming,” Martin said. “When they discover the difference in quality of their coffee, they start to care more about where and whom it’s coming from.”
The author introduces the farm where Jesus Martin grew up as…
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Coffee decaffeination processes
Every day it seems that medical researchers come out with a new study about coffee, how it is extremely unhealthy for you and/or full of amazing benefits. The focus of most of these studies is more particularly about the effects of caffeine on human health. As caffeine, coffee’s most potent element, is a stimulant, it can produce both positive and negative effects. It can wake you up in the morning, but it can also lead to sleeplessness, a racing heartbeat, and anxiety.
It is therefore no surprise that many people have decided to cut caffeine out of their diets. As for me, I have grown to like the taste of coffee, but to me the main purpose of drinking it is to get an extra jolt of energy. That is why I will admit to a certain prejudice against decaf, perhaps prompted by bad experiences with weak and tasteless brew, because it is true that the actual process of removing caffeine from coffee can degrade the taste beyond repair.
Early decaffeination attempts involved soaking the green beans in water and then using various solvents to separate the caffeine in the resulting water solution. The beans were then re-introduced to the caffeine-free solution in order to absorb some of the flavour they had lost. Solvents used included benzene, chloroform, and trichloroethylene, all of which were later found to have toxic effects. In the 1970s, dichloromethane came into use to replace the earlier solvents before it too was deemed possibly carcinogenic.
In response to these concerns about solvents, some coffee companies began to run the water solution through charcoal filters as a means of removing the caffeine. The so-called Swiss Water Process, developed in Switzerland in the 1930s, goes one step further. After a batch of coffee beans has been steeped in hot water, that water is filtered, and then is used to soak the next batch of beans to be processed. In this way, the beans lose caffeine as they soak, but lose less of their flavour.
Yet another method that aims to safely remove caffeine from coffee beans involves a fascinating compound procedure. The solvent used in this method is neither water nor one of the earlier toxic solvents. Instead, caffeine in the coffee beans is dissolved by means of carbon dioxide. In order to accomplish this, the carbon dioxide must become a supercritical fluid, created when it is compressed and heated to the point that it has the same density in liquid and gaseous forms.
As this supercritical CO2 is passed through the beans, it can penetrate them because of its gaseous properties, and yet is able to dissolve the caffeine they contain because of its liquid properties.
In 2004, Brazilian scientists identified a new strain of coffee beans with a naturally low level of caffeine. They found three coffee plants from Ethiopia that contain almost no caffeine as they seem to lack an enzyme necessary to caffeine production. If these plants can be crossed with commercial strains of coffee plants, we may one day see more coffee on the market that is naturally low in caffeine.
With these advances, and the current methods of decaffeination, decaf junkies are sure to be able to get their fix of coffee that not only tastes great, but won’t keep them up half the night.
As for me, I do want to stay up half the night, so I’ll stick to my full-strength brew.
According to the text (paragraph 1), the effects of caffeine…