Coffee Arabica: leaves, flowers, and fruit I sing a song with a few Spanish phrases: mi amor, mi corazón. This is a happy time, when the year’s hard work of pruning, fertilizing, weeding, tending, and repairing roads and water channels comes down to ripe coffee. I hear other harvesters - whole families of them - chatting and singing in Spanish. In some cases where the soil lacks sufficient boron, I might have found only one bean, called a peaberry, considered by some to possess a slightly more concentrated taste. Spitting out the parchment, I finally get the two beans, which are covered by a diaphanous silver skin. Like peanuts, coffee beans usually grow in facing pairs. It takes a bit of tongue work to get down to the tough-skinned parchment protecting each bean. I pop the skin of a ripe coffee cherry open in my mouth and savor the sweet mucilage. In a recently released updated edition, Pendergrast paints a beautiful backdrop to the story at a Guatemalan coffee planation 4,500 feet above sea level: It may have taken a Founding Father to teach Americans how to make it, it wasn’t until Mark Pendergrast’s 1999 book Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World ( public library) that coffee’s rich legacy and anthropology came into full bloom. Coffee - from its artful preparation to its secret history - holds enormous cultural mesmerism as the world’s favorite psychoactive drug.
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