Tag: Coffee

That Morning Cup Of “Joe”

Yep that time again, Sunday and a day of either FYI or history, sometimes both.

I believe it was last Sunday that I wrote about the dangers lurking in decaf coffee……

Decaf Drinkers Beware!

I truly adore my cups of coffee in the mornings it makes the day a bit brighter…..but what do you know about coffee other than it is a great starter for the day?

The bad news is that there could be higher prices on the horizon….the Eastern horizon….

Coffee prices this morning are sharply higher, with arabica climbing to a 1-1/2 year high and robusta coffee posting a new all-time high. Coffee crop concerns in Brazil and Vietnam are fueling fund buying of coffee futures. Somar Meteorologia reported Monday that Brazil’s Minas Gerais region received 15.8 mm of rainfall in the past week, or 74% of the historical average. Minas Gerais accounts for about 30% of Brazil’s arabica crop. Robusta coffee is surging to new record highs on fears that excessive dryness in Vietnam will limit the country’s robusta coffee production.

Tight robusta coffee supplies from Vietnam, the world’s largest producer of robusta coffee beans, are a major bullish factor. On March 26, Vietnam’s agriculture department projected that Vietnam’s coffee production in the 2023/24 crop year could drop by -20% to 1.472 MMT, the smallest crop in four years, due to drought. Also, the Vietnam Coffee Association said that Vietnam’s 2023/24 coffee exports could drop -20% y/y to 1.336 MM. In addition, Marex Group Plc forecasts a global 2024/25 robusta coffee deficit of -2.7 million bags due to reduced output in Vietnam.

https://www.barchart.com/story/news/25518464/coffee-prices-surge-on-global-crop-concerns

You are in luck on this Sunday I can fill a few of your knowledge gaps about this magical elixir……

That coffee you slurped this morning? It’s 600,000 years old. Using genes from coffee plants around the world, researchers built a family tree for the world’s most popular type of coffee, known to scientists as Coffea arabica and to coffee lovers simply as “arabica,” the AP reports. The researchers, hoping to learn more about the plants to better protect them from pests and climate change, found that the species emerged around 600,000 years ago through natural crossbreeding of two other coffee species. “In other words, prior to any intervention from man,” said Victor Albert, a biologist at the University at Buffalo who co-led the study. published Monday in the journal Nature Genetics.

  • These wild coffee plants originated in Ethiopia but are thought to have been first roasted and brewed primarily in Yemen starting in the 1400s. In the 1600s, Indian monk Baba Budan is fabled to have smuggled seven raw coffee beans back to his homeland from Yemen, laying the foundation for coffee’s global takeover.
  • Arabica coffee, prized for its smooth and relatively sweet flavor, now makes up 60% to 70% of the global coffee market and is brewed by brands such as Starbucks, Tim Horton’s, and Dunkin. The rest is robusta, a stronger and more bitter coffee made from one of arabica’s parents, Coffea canephora.
  • The arabica plant’s population fluctuated over thousands of years before humans began cultivating it, flourishing during warm, wet periods and suffering through dry ones. These lean times created so-called population bottlenecks, when only a small number of genetically similar plants survived. Today, that renders arabica coffee plants more vulnerable to diseases like coffee leaf rust, which cause billions of dollars in losses every year.
  • Researchers from Nestlé, which owns several coffee brands, contributed to the study. The study clarifies how arabica came to be and spotlights clues that could help safeguard the crop, said Fabian Echeverria, an adviser for the Center for Coffee Research and Education at Texas A&M University who was not involved with the research.

I have given you the good news and the bad and even threw in a little history….but now the question is what makes coffee taste so damn good?

What is the best way to tell how a coffee is going to taste before you make it? Contrary to belief, the flavor of your coffee isn’t always determined by where it came from. It’s a combination of the microclimate the coffee plant grew up in, nutrient levels in the soil, age of the plant, rainfall (or lack thereof), roast level and one hundred and one other variables that shape and reshape the bean within the coffee plant’s fruit.

But there’s an argument to be made that no variable — other than maybe roast level — has a more plainly noticeable effect on coffee flavor as the “process,” something that’s stamped on any decent bag of coffee, which simply refers to how the coffee bean is removed from the cherry.

https://www.gearpatrol.com/home/natural-vs-washed-coffee/

Now that I have given you the history and the important questions I would like to close with some medical news about coffee….

Coffee is one of the world’s most popular beverages, cherished for its flavor and the boost of alertness it offers thanks to its caffeine content.

Recent research has highlighted another potential benefit of coffee: its association with a lower risk of developing liver disease.

This article explores the evidence behind this finding, offering insights into how drinking coffee could help protect liver health.

The liver is a crucial organ that plays a vital role in filtering toxins, aiding digestion, and regulating metabolism.

Liver disease includes a range of conditions such as hepatitis, fatty liver disease, and cirrhosis, which can progressively damage the liver, impairing its ability to function effectively. Finding ways to prevent liver disease is therefore of significant interest in medical research

https://knowridge.com/2024/04/coffee-and-liver-health-a-surprising-connection/

Damn!  Time for another cup!

I hope everyone has a wonderful Sunday….if weather permits go out and enjoy the day…. and as always….Be Well and Be Safe….

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Decaf Drinkers Beware!

It is another Sunday and a day where I try to be informative…..so today instead of history it will be an FYI.

I admit it I love a good cup of coffee…..when my blood pressure went high my doctor said I needed to cut out salt (no problem for I use very little salt) and to cut my coffee drinking….so under his advice I went to decaf, I would rather drink urinal water then this stuff and then Sue got me some half-caf, better than decaf but still lacked taste….for you see I drink my coffee straight….no milk, no sugar, no flavors of any sort….so taste is important to me….after about a month I chanced it and went back to real coffee (actually Sue got it for me for she was tired of my ‘bitchiness’).

Now that I have given you my diatribe of coffee maybe it is time for me to get to the point……

So if you are a drinker of decaf coffee you might want to pay attention….

For fans of decaffeinated coffee, we have some bad news.

The not-so-buzzy version of coffee can harbor a chemical that can cause cancer, CNN reports, which has health and environmental activists pushing to have the substance banned for its use in making decaf coffee.

Methylene chloride is the substance in question and it’s used by coffee roasters to remove caffeine from coffee beans. It’s also utilized as a solvent in various manufacturing and commercial processes, but the federal government banned its use as a paint stripper in 2019 and is now considering an almost complete kibosh on its use for consumers and industry except in limited settings.

The reason? Short-term exposure to the chemical, research shows, can harm your central nervous system. And being exposed to the chemical for a longer period can induce liver and lung cancers, as well as liver damage more generally.

https://futurism.com/neoscope/decaf-coffee-cancer

My taste buds saved me from this worry….and I thank them.

As long as I have you here and interested….

Is there a coffee apocalypse coming?

When Henri Kunz was growing up in West Germany in the 1980s, he used to drink an instant coffee substitute called Caro, a blend of barley, chicory root, and rye roasted to approximate the deep color and invigorating flavor of real coffee. “We kids drank it,” Kunz remembered recently. “It had no caffeine, but it tasted like coffee.”

As an adult, Kunz loves real coffee. But he also believes that its days are numbered. Climate change is expected to shift the areas where coffee can grow, with some researchers estimating that the most suitable land for coffee will shrink by more than half by 2050 and that hotter temperatures will make the plants more vulnerable to pests, blight, and other threats. At the same time, demand for coffee is growing, as upwardly mobile people in traditionally tea-drinking countries in Asia develop a taste for java.

“The difference between demand and supply will go like that,” Kunz put it during a Zoom interview, crossing his arms in front of his chest to form an X, like the “no-good” emoji. Small farmers could face crop failures just as millions of new people develop a daily habit, potentially sending coffee prices soaring to levels that only the wealthy will be able to afford.

To stave off the looming threats, some agricultural scientists are hard at work breeding climate-resilient, high-yield varieties of coffee. Kunz, the founder and chair of a “flavor engineering” company called Stem, thinks he can solve many of these problems by growing coffee cells in a laboratory instead of on a tree. A number of other entrepreneurs are taking a look at coffee substitutes of yore, like the barley beverage Kunz grew up drinking, with the aim of using sustainable ingredients to solve coffee’s environmental problems—and adding caffeine to reproduce its signature jolt.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2024/04/coffee-cup-best-bean-brand-climate.html

Damn climate change!

I shall continue to drink that magical brew until my last breath or until I can longer afford it whichever comes first.

A little FYI for my readers….have a marvelous Sunday and as always….Be Well and Be Safe….

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Good Coffee!

May I see a show of hands….how many ever had a good cup of coffee?  Now how many had a good cup while serving in the military?  If you were in a war zone then most times you depended on instant which makes a ghastly cup of coffee or you were at CandC and you had to drink coffee from a huge urn that was made around the time of the crucifixion….any way a good cup of coffee in the military is a thing of desire from soldiers from decades long past.

My regular visitors know that I truly love my coffee….black no sugar…..it seems I find more bad coffee than good…..

I do a lot of research and in some of my readings I find a good piece that I would like to share on my weekends when I try to stay away from the mind numbing crap in the news for the past week.

One of my sessions of research I found an article about how to make a good cup of coffee in bad places…..

Making coffee isn’t strictly relegated to your kitchen or the local coffee shop. People around the world find ways to enjoy a hot brew in high-altitude mountains to the middle of the ocean, and everywhere in-between. A good cup of coffee can make inhospitable conditions more tolerable, but the quality in your cup often suffers without the trappings of your home coffee kit.

Evan Hafer, the CEO of Black Rifle Coffee Company, found a way to make great coffee in one of the most extreme environments on earth: war.

Hafer served as both a U.S. Army Special Forces non-commissioned officer (NCO) and a contractor for the CIA, with assignments that took him to combat zones around the world. Even during the invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003, he found a way to grind and brew his daily dose of caffeine — without sacrificing quality.

https://coffeeordie.com/good-coffee-bad-places-evan-hafer/

Some great ideas and I think that this should be included in the combat package that they give to every troop deploying to a war zone…..

And now it is time for one of my marvelous cups of freshly ground Colombian beans…..cheers!