Wanda Cooper, age 17, of White Plains, N.Y., for her question:
HOW ARE COFFEE BEANS PREPARED?
Coffee is a drink that is made from the roasted and ground beans of the coffee tree. The beans are inside berries that grow on coffee trees cultivated in Java, Sumatra, India, Arabia, equatorial Africa, Hawaii, Mexico, Central and South America and West Indies.
All the berries must be hand picked because no one has yet found a way to harvest them successfully by machine. After the berries are picked, they are put through a sluice, which is a bath of running water. Sticks, leaves and green and bad berries float on top. The good ones sink to the bottom.
The berries then go to a pulping house, where machinery removes the pulp. Each berry contains two beans, which are actually seeds. Each bean has a thin parchment like skin, and a second covering called the silver skin.
At first the uncovered beans are soft and bluish green, but later they become hard and pale yellow.
After the pulping process, the beans are run through a series of fermenting and washing tanks. The beans are dried and left to cure for several weeks.
Hulling and peeling make up the next step. Milling machines remove the parchment and the silver skin. As the beans come from the machine, a fan blows off the loose skins.
The beans then go to a machine called the separator, which removes sand, dust and small or broken beans. The coffee beans are sorted until only the largest and best beans remain.
Most coffee is shipped to the roasting plant in 132 pound bags where the beans are emptied ino chutes leading from an upper to a lower floor. An air suction device removes dust.
Next the coffee goes a blending machine, a cylinder that mixes different types of coffee.
From the blender, the beans flow by gravity to storage bins and then to roaster ovens. There they are roasted at 900 degrees Fahrenheit for 16 to 17 minutes.
In the roaster ovens, the beans lose about a sixth of their weight.
The beans are then cooled and cleaned. Next they are carried to bins where they are stored until ground.
After being ground to drip, regular or fine requirements, the coffee is packed either in vacuum tins or in paper bags.
Instant coffee can be either powdered or freeze dried. Both require adding water to make coffee.
Powdered instant coffee is made by brewing coffee in huge containers and evaporating the water from the brew. The remaining powder crystals become coffee again when water is added.
Freeze dried instant coffee is made by converting freshly brewed coffee into an extract and freezing it in slabs. The slabs are ground into chunks and placed in pressurized chambers. Moisture in the form of ice is drawn off, leaving dry coffee crystals.
Coffee is the favorite hot adult drink in almost every country in temperate or cold climates. The United States ranks as the largest consumer of coffee in the world.