It would take several decades of experimentation, but eventually, these farming villagers would discover the basics of coffee making that we all recognize. The berries must be picked, stripped of their flesh, roasted, ground down into a grainy form of kernels or particles, and then steeped briefly in hot water. After the steeping, they should be filtered out of the fluid. That is how you make coffee! That is the way it has been done for centuries, and it is still the way we do it today. The specific tools that we use to make our coffees, however, are something the first drinkers of the brew would never have imagined.

The first people to bring coffee to the rest of the world were the Arabs. They developed what is still served as Turkish coffee today, employing beans ground into a powder and a special brewing pot called an ibrik. Turkish coffee always leaves a thick sludge in the bottom of the ibrik and the drinker’s cup, but as if to compensate, the drink always has a delicious foam at the top. If you have a fascination for ancient technology, it is now fairly easy to find and purchase ibriks online for between 25 to 50 dollars.

The Turks and Arabs introduced coffee to Italy just as Columbus was opening up new worlds to the Europeans. In short order the brew was known everywhere. When the English Colonies became the United States, they were cut off from their tea suppliers, and coffee was soon the foremost beverage in the nation. As the United States developed an awareness of international cuisines during the last few decades, cappuccino became a fun way to enjoy coffee. Starbucks emerged, along with other coffee franchises, and today consumers all over North America have the option of dozens of different coffee brews at any time of the day.

Today coffee is an important cash crop for many Third World nations. We import huge shipments of the roasted beans, which are actually seeds. Unroasted and green coffee seeds are also imported by roasteries, and there is also a small trade in raw, unprocessed coffee berries. This expansion of raw materials has been accompanied by an explosion in coffee technology. As the Italians invented expresso, they invented the large, industrial expresso machine, made to turn out multiple cups of expresso and cappuccino in cafes. Today, expresso machines designed specifically to grind and percolate single portions of the brew in small household kitchen can be found in most large department stores and mall stores specializing in coffee. The world has embraced coffee in the home and work place. Why not make a brew that suits your own style? Anything is possible!

From the earliest days of coffee drinking, the berries were stripped of their flesh to get to the seeds inside. Modern coffee suppliers also use industrial methods to ensure that the slimy remains of the berry, called mucilage, is completely removed. This is usually done through a process of fermentation, which uses large amounts of water and creates a pollutant called coffee wastewater. Modern machinery has eased this problem, but conscientious growers are hard to find, and the problem remains. If you ever buy raw coffee berries, you will need to take steps to remove the mucilage from the seed itself.

After the seeds have been thoroughly cleaned, they are then called green coffee beans. These are ready for roasting or the decaffeination process. Green coffee can also be aged, which makes them less acidic. Coffee experts still go at each other like the Kilkenny Kats when they debate the value of aging. Green coffee, speaking in the most general terms, has a shelf life of one year from harvest before it loses substantial flavors due to the evaporation of its natural oils.

The next step in creating good coffee is roasting, arguably the most important part of the entire process. Roasting determines the flavors of the beans. Green coffee, with its stable shelf life, is usually shipped out to roasteries near the place where they will be marketed. Home roasting is a relatively new phenomenon, and the equipment you will need to do home roasting is easy to find – one advocate of home roasting used a popcorn popper! There are some machines dedicated to home roasting available online, of course, at a wide variety of prices.

When you roast coffee, the color that you create in the beans tells you a lot about what flavors you will have. The darker beans will generally begin to introduce light touches of sweetness into the brew. Lighter beans with less heating will definitely have more caffeine in them. The darker beans will have more intense flavors. It is important to note that if you by green coffee from exotic locales, they will tend to lose more of their distinctive flavors as they become darker.

After the roasting, the last stage in preparing coffee for it’s soaking is the grinding. If you use a home grinder, to provide any sort variety in your brew, you should have at least two settings: coarse and fine. Most of your coffees will require a fine grind. Turkish coffee is so specialized that it requires beans ground into a powder! Coarse grinds are acceptable for the automatic drippers found in many American homes today. Remember that expressos and all the drinks (like cappuccino and mocha) that depend on expresso require a fine grind. Expressos also cannot be made properly with an automatic dripper – you’ll need a good expresso machine to make a good cup of expresso!