How coffee is made

Saw an interesting half hour fact-show tonight (don’t watch many of those) about coffee – where it comes from, it’s effects on us, how much our nation consumes etc. Picked up a couple of snippets that I actually thought I knew, but really I just assumed I did, because it turns out I really had no idea.

• Coffee roasted in New Zealand – green beans, big oven. That’s it. No additives or flavouring. Just roast it until it “looks the right colour. About 17 minutes.” According to Atomic in Auckland. So how do different companies get such different tasting coffee then? Is it down to blending and length of roast? And that that’s why we can have so many coffee companies here claiming to roast their own beans?
• Caffiene – it’s not a drug. It’s a pesticide!! A naturally occurring pesticide that the plant forms to keep away nasty bugs. Well I never. I’m drinking a spray.
• Instant coffee – god knows what I actually thought this was made of but it turns out that it’s beginnings are exactly the same as locally roasted coffee. Just a blend of the same type of beans and a big oven. To get the instantness they soak the roasted beans in water (kind of like really crude plunger coffee I suppose) drain of the brown liquid, dry it, and smash it up into powder or the more sophisticated granules. Errr, not that I’m going to start drinking it.

Nothing alarming in the report to change my coffee habits.

Oh, the programme was What’s really in our food on 3.