Knowing About Your Coffee Beverages

A cappuccino is espresso mixed with frothed milk and a latte is one that is blended with steamed milk. All these blended drinks, along with others, use the same coffee bean and are some of the best and more popular coffee beverages.

Before the coffee bean arrives to your favourite store, the seeds are processed with a series of long and carefully monitored processes, hand picking and sorting one seed at a time. When the beans are ready, they are used to create some of the more popular types of coffee around the world.

Calling a beverage, the coffee, is like calling a glass of wine, the wine. This is a general label applied to different types of beverages. The basic principle is the same with all coffee beverages, coffee is created by filtering hot water through ground coffee beans.

You can drink a black coffee, without milk or a white coffee, with milk, cream or sugar, it is among the most popular beverages all over the world.

In comparison to wine, which differs based on the types of grapes used to make the wine and on the region, coffee is also affected by the type of bean used to make it.

The taste of a coffee bean is very different depending on the type of plant it is from and where in the world it is grown, not to mention the maturity of the bean when it was picked off the plant.

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Grinding Your Own Coffee With Fresh Whole Bean Coffee

Fresh whole bean coffee can fall into any category, like fair trade, organic or regularly-grown. That's because it doesn't really specify any particular kind of bean or a method of growing it.

So why do retailers, whether they are fair trade or regular stores, like to make a special point of letting you know whether a coffee they're selling you is whole bean or already ground?

That's because it tends to be fresher than pre-ground. That's a key to why it actually works well as fair trade coffee.

What many people think of as the superiority of fresh whole bean coffee comes from one simple fact; whole beans keep their flavor and aroma longer than if they are ground. Once ground, they have more exposure to air and humidity, and the freshness begins to evaporate.

It doesn't matter what sort of gourmet coffee you might be dealing with, if the beans are pre-ground, you'll lose freshness in the package much more quickly than if they're left intact until just before brewing.

Fair trade wholesale buyers may recognize a slight advantage in fresh whole bean coffee, if they are able to take the coffee from the farmer to the end consumer more quickly than normal coffee brokers can.

The coffee already has a good likelihood of tasting better if it's been grown organically. Combine these two factors, and many fair trade brands of coffee have a good chance of being fresher and more delicious than coffee grown in a more mass produced setting.

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Knowing About Better Organic Coffee Beans

Two main species of coffee beans comprise almost ninety percent of the beans used in all the coffees of the world. This means that whatever it takes to grow the arabica (Coffea arabica) or robusta (Coffea canephora) plants, people are going to do so.

This includes growing them organically if they are included in a fair trade coffee program, no matter how difficult that might be. These are two very valuable crops, and there's always a market for them.

Different regions of the world will tend to feature fair trade certified coffees of different species, because the species grow best in slightly different conditions. Arabica needs higher altitudes and more shade, while robusta can grow in hotter climates and closer to sea level.

Robusta tends to be found more in central and western Africa, but also in Southeast Asia. In fact, in recent years, Vietnam has become the world's largest exporter of robusta, the only species it grows. A fair trade program working with growers in these parts of the world would deal mostly in robusta coffee beans.

Between the two coffee plants, it's the arabica that presents the greater challenge when it comes to producing certified organic coffee. With a plant that has greater susceptibility to pests, growing it without resorting to pesticides can be hard work.

But coffee beans from both arabica and robusta are so valuable in the world market that there will always be a market for them, and as long as fair trade principles are in place, it will always be worth growing either of them.

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