Life cycle of a cup of coffee

How many people are needed to make a cup of coffee? For many of us, it only requires a brief stroll and a quick pour. But this commonplace item is the result of a global process that was much more expensive and complex than you might think. Pitalito, a small town in remote Colombia, is where it all starts. To make room for orderly rows of Coffea trees, local family farms have cleared local forests in this area. The equatorial regions now cultivate these shrub-like plants, which were first domesticated in Ethiopia. Coffee cherries, which are tiny berries, are found in abundance on every shrub. The best way to harvest fruit is by hand because different fruits on the same branch may ripen at different times, but each farm has a different way of processing the fruit.

In Pitalito, harvesters toil from dawn until dusk at great heights, frequently picking more than 25 kilograms per shift for extremely meager pay. Delivering the cherries to the wet mill are the workers. With the help of this device, the seeds are separated from the fruit and sorted according to density. The seeds that are the heaviest and most flavorful are collected from the mill's bottom and placed in a tub of water to ferment for one to two days. The remaining fruit is then washed off by workers, who then spread the seeds out to dry. In Pitalito, however, seeds are spread onto substantial mesh racks by hand rather than using machinery as in other farms. Workers rake the seeds frequently over the following three weeks to make sure they dry evenly. A truck transports the dried coffee beans to a nearby mill that houses a number of specialized machinery. The seeds are re-sorted by density using an air blower, sorted by size using a variety of sieves, and sorted by color using an optical scanner.

At this point, experts known as Q-graders choose samples of beans to roast and brew. They assess the coffee's quality through the "cupping" process, which involves tasting, smelling, and tasting the coffee. These specialists grade the beans and prepare them for shipping. Onto steel shipping containers, each holding up to 21 metric tons of coffee, workers load burlap sacks containing up to 70 kilograms of dried and sorted coffee beans. Coffee is transported around the world on cargo ships manned by more than 25 people from tropical ports, but the United States imports the most coffee, with New York City alone consuming millions of cups daily. Our coffee beans cross customs after making the lengthy trip from Colombia to New Jersey. After dockworkers have unloaded the container, a fleet of 18-wheelers moves the coffee to a nearby warehouse before delivering it to a roastery. Here, the beans are roasted in a machine that has a metal arm that stirs the beans while a gas fire heats the roasting machine. While trained coffee engineers manually adjust these levels during the twelve-minute roasting cycle, nearby sensors track the coffee's moisture content, chemical stability, and temperature.

Through the release of oil from the seed, the seeds are transformed into brewable, grindable beans with a dark brown color and a robust aroma. After roasting, workers package the beans into five-pound bags, which a fleet of vans then deliver to cafes and shops all over the city. Although you can now smell the coffee, it still needs more assistance to reach the finish line. Every coffee company has a head buyer who picks out beans from all over the world with care. Baristas across the city bravely serve this caffeinated elixir to hordes of frantic customers while logistics teams manage bean delivery routes. Hundreds of people are needed to transport coffee to its final location, not including those who keep up the infrastructure that enables the journey. A large number of these people perform risky work for little or no pay.

So let's be careful not to value the finished product more highly than the people who made it while still marveling at the global network that supports this commodity.