Coffee and chicory : $b Their culture, chemical composition, preparation for market, and consumption, with simple tests for detecting adulteration, and practical hints for the producer and consumerSimmonds, P. L. (Peter Lund)
Science
Coffee and chicory : $b Their culture, chemical composition, preparation for market, and consumption, with simple tests for detecting adulteration, and practical hints for the producer and consumer
Simmonds, P. L. (Peter Lund)
Chicory; Coffee; Food adulteration and inspection
Aden, _alias_ Mocha, coffee is, along with the other coffees of the Red
Sea, sent first to Bombay in Arab ships, where it is “garbelled”
(picked), previously to its being exported to England. The bean is
always broad and small, and the climate of India is supposed to improve
its flavour. The seed of the Berbera (Abyssinian) plant is usually
called long-berried Mocha.
The Java and East Indian, next in quality, are larger, and of a paler
yellow. The Ceylon berries are of irregular sizes, ill-shaped, and of a
spotted dirty cream-colour. The terms “Plantation” and “Native” coffees,
as applied to Ceylon berries, are distinctions arising from one being
the cultivated coffee of the estates of the planters, which are better
attended to and prepared for market, while the other is that grown in a
wild or careless manner by the natives about their dwellings, and more
rudely prepared. Java coffee is chiefly prized in the market for its
delicacy of flavour, but in point of strength it falls short of the West
Indian.
Of Bourbon coffee there are in commerce two qualities, fine and
ordinary. The first is in small seeds, well selected for size, of a
variable colour, yellow or green, with little pellicle, the furrow
slightly indented, and it has a sweet odour. The second is badly
assorted as regards form and colour, and its odour less agreeable.
The Jamaica coffee-berry is medium-sized, of a greenish blue colour,
rather oblong, and smooth to the touch. It has a strong, agreeable
smell, and excellent flavour, and when carefully picked and sorted,
fetches about the highest price of any kind.
Porto Rico is a middle-sized coffee, of a pure and agreeable flavour;
the colour of the better sorts is a bluish green; and of the common,
yellow.
The West Indian and Brazilian coffees have a bluish or greenish-grey
tint. This grey-green shade of the Western coffees is entirely deficient
in those of Asia. The value of the berry in our wholesale markets is
not, therefore, a fictitious quality, as some imagine, but is real, and
depends first upon the texture and form of the berry or seed, secondly
on the colour, and thirdly the flavour. The texture of the berry and
form, termed “style” by the coffee brokers, is so well defined and
palpable to the initiated, that at one view they pronounce its value,
from one hundred and thirty shillings per cwt. downwards, according to
the two other qualities, colour and flavour.
The value of the coffees usually imported into this country stands in
the following order: Mocha, fine Ceylon Plantation, Jamaica, Costa Rica,
Java, Tellicherry, and St. Domingo.
Portugal produces coffee in several of her colonies. Ordinary
description, yellowish berry, in St. Thomas; tolerably good in the Cape
de Verdes; bad, yellow, in Timor; worse (but curious from the very small
size of the berry), growing wild, in Mozambique; good in Angola; and of
excellent quality in Madeira and Porto Santo, but the production is
limited.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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