Your Aunt Toby, Tom Hanks, and Wilson-the-soccer-ball are marooned on a desert island and Tom is just totally out of his mind because he wants a cup of coffee. What to do..oh, what to do? Is this something that can be done on a locovore basis?

One of the ways to be more self-sufficient is to have your own garden and orchard. Depending on where you live, you can grow apples, pears and plums or peaches and citrus. Location counts for a lot. But there really is one thing that no matter where you live in the Continental United States, you are really not going to be able to grow for yourself.

Coffee.

Coffee (Coffea arabica and Coffea canephora var. robusta are the two plants that produce beans suitable for making coffee) is a creature of the tropics. The only place in the US where coffee can and is grown is Hawaii. If you want that great cup of coffee, you will just have to accept that it’s traveled a very long way (in more senses than mere physical travel) to get to the point where you turn it into a beverage in your morning mug.

For another writing assignment (centered around me, Tom, the soccer ball and some coffee beans), I decided I had to get to know more about coffee than I could unearth over the Internet. I approached my local experts, Dave and Kathy Pagnani and Eric Cole, owners of Java Joe’s Roasting Company in Binghamton, New York. java joes roasting co.They come to coffee from a pretty unique perspective: Dave is an engineer who absolutely loves coffee. The chemistry that makes that cup taste, feel in your mouth, and penetrate your brain through your nose would boggle your mind.

There are 800 different compounds in green coffee beans. What happens to the beans between when they are picked, cleaned, dried, shipped, roasted and ground makes all the difference in your cup.

Like wine, where and under what conditions the coffee trees are grown makes a huge difference. Shade grown? Mountain grown? Grown in the full sun?

Growing location and type of bean also effects exactly what a coffee roaster can do with the beans themselves. The window of temperatures that can bring out the best in coffee beans is actually pretty small – 430 degrees to 470 degrees F. Not all coffee beans do well at all temperatures. A roaster can produce several different types and flavors of coffees from one bean – or the roaster might only be able to produce one type of coffee from one bean. For example, Brazilian coffee beans do best at a light roast. Ethiopian beans have a much broader window, so a roaster can produce several different roasts from the coffee beans.

Roasting is more art than science. Roasting coffee is not like baking a cake at home, where you preheat the oven to a certain temperature, put in the pans, set a timer and off we go. It’s much more subtle than that. How quickly the equipment heats to the temperature the roaster wants makes a huge difference in the quality of the end product. What the roaster is doing is turning those chemical compounds into…other things. Some of these are volatile chemicals that when they reach their correct temperature inside the bean will be driven off, or turned into sugars which will then be caramelized. What you are ending up with in the mug has been turned into something that not only has the capacity to taste terrific, but also has been turned into a form of perfume as well. The experience in the cup is dependent on a large number of factors. What roasting does is opens up the beans. In this photo, on the left is a 1/2 cup of green beans. On the right is a 1/2 cup of green beans after I’d roasted them. They got a lot bigger.

How finely the roasted beans are ground is a whole other science – decisions have to be made right from the level of the sack of beans as to what the end product in the cup is going to be. Every different type of coffee maker: drip, percolated, espresso, French press — requires a different level of grinding.

Every time you shake your head over the price of coffee beans, I’m hoping all of this is leading you to think, “a cup of coffee is still the world’s cheapest form of enjoyment.”

But part of this experiment was also to get truly basic with coffee. Could I make a drinkable cup of coffee if all I had was my wits, my new found knowledge, some basic tools, and a bag of green coffee beans?

Dave, Kathy and Eric kindly provided me with a small bag of Brazilian beans, which were chosen because a) I had no idea how I was going to roast and grind the beans and b) Brazilian beans are best at a lower roasting temperature. They figured that I’d have my best shot at producing a drinkable cup of coffee with these. I have literally no traditional coffee making equipment here – we don’t drink coffee at Chez Siberia (long story), so I would have to work with this coffee with what is literally at hand.

What a cup of coffee is: The beverage in the cup is produced by extracting the flavor and scent compounds out of the roasted and ground up beans by passing a liquid through the grounds. That’s it.

The set up I used would be perfect for post-Apocalyptic crisis conditions while being pursued by Zombies and hiding out in an abandoned farmhouse. It would NOT be useful under “Tom Hanks and Wilson-the-soccer-ball marooned on a desert island” circumstances. I had to figure out how to perform the three operations: roasting, grinding, extracting. To do those, I had to find whatever was at hand.

To do the Roasting, I could use:

Grill or other non-electric method of producing heat. Roasting pan. Hot pads or some other protection for my hands.

Make a fire using whatever fuel is at hand and bank the coals down to an even layer at the bottom. It should be hot enough that you can’t hold your hand over it for more than a count of three.

Put some beans into a small roasting pan. Hold the pan over the heat and swirl it around. If you want to stir it constantly, that works too but I think you will get hot spots on the pan and therefore, burned beans. As you swirl them around, you will see a) the beans get bigger and darker and b) little odd bits of fibrous material come off. As you swirl, blow it a bit or flip the pan a bit to get these chaff to come off.

When the beans are uniformly brown (don’t let them get too brown or burned), you are done – allow to cool. My roasting took about 10 minutes and it turned out to be a really light roast.

Cleaning: As the beans cool, flip the beans up and down in the pan. If you have a nice breeze, that will help get rid of the chaff.

Grinding: We need to break the beans down into the smallest particles I could manage. My WMD was a meat tenderizer (a fairly common tool to be found in an abandoned farmhouse, one should think) – anything usable as a striking object with a flat surface will do (although I would not suggest using a rock other than perhaps volcanic or igneous – you’ll end up with little bits of rock in your coffee). Sandwich the beans inside of something and protect them with something else – I sandwiched them between two pieces of paper on top of a cutting board, with an old phone book underneath and on top. Smashing the beans was the hardest part of the process and took quite a lot of muscle to turn what started out as ½ cup of green beans into the roasted and ground coffee I used.

Cuppa Joe: The ‘cowboy coffee’ method: Throwing the ground coffee into a heat proof container with water, bring to a boil, take off the heat and strain. That will work and produces something of the ‘Turkish coffee’ sort of beverage. My method was slightly more elegant: I packaged my grounds inside a clean, rinsed piece of fabric I found in my stash. I then put it into a bowl and poured boiling water over it and let it steep like tea until it got to a color that said, “coffee” to me.
That’s it.

The ‘experience’ – Did it smell like coffee? You bet. The smell of the roasted beans and the beverage attracted other family members. Did it taste like coffee? Yes. Not a robust “cuppa” for sure – but it was definitely coffee and for someone who was desperate, good enough.

Other tools which could be substituted, depending on the energy source:

Step

Non-electric: Electric Available:

Roasting Stove-top popcorn popper Air popcorn popper

Frying pan (don’t use cast iron)

Electric frying pan

Grinding Mortar and pestle Food processor

Two rocks – one round, one dished Home coffee grinder

Extracting

Put grounds into a jar with cold water, strain See coffee makers, any

Stove top or campfire percolator

Put grounds into a clay pot or a clean leather bag with water, put heated rocks in into the pot or bag until the liquid is hot.

Straining

Any finely woven piece of material will do – clean old dress shirt, bandanas, clean old sheet, paper filters. Don’t try tee-shirts – knit fabrics will not drain properly.

Tips for making the best cuppa you can get out of your beans.
However your instrument of torture works, keep it clean and when you make coffee, take whatever is used to hold the coffee and take it off the heat. Drinking reheated coffee is agony – it raises all the oils and acids. Better to just throw the rest of the coffee away.

Buy roasted beans and a grinder and grind them as you need. Ground coffee looses it’s oomph pretty quickly, once the bag is opened, even if you keep it in the fridge. Better to keep the roasted beans in the freezer, take out what you need and put the rest back.

Needless to say, after all this work, I’m more than happy to buy a cup of coffee. Sometimes, it’s just worth it to buy it.