robust than its Arabica cousin. It grows at lower altitude (and contains as much as double the amount of caffeine, perhaps in order to deal with the more persistent insects of the tropical lowlands), it tastes coarse and rubbery, and has very little to recommend it other than resistance to disease, which is in itself a recommendation only to planters. It was initially banned from the New York Coffee Exchange as a ‘practically worthless bean’. Being considerably cheaper than Arabica, it can be found in all sorts of less salubrious locations: instant coffee, cheap blends, vending machine coffee and the like. Its harsh flavour and heavy caffeine kick are easily identified. Introduced only a century ago, with the sudden rise to prominence of Vietnam (see chapter 18), it threatens to become a major force in the market, replacing the subtle refined flavours and aromas of Arabica coffee with its pestilential presence. It has some uses in espresso blending, but otherwise it is Arabica coffee’s crude, boorish, sour, uncivilized, black-hearted cousin, and true coffee aficionados rightly give it a very wide berth. No coffee-taster worth his or her salt would seek to maintain that a Robusta coffee was better in flavour terms than all but the worst-produced Arabica: its only merit is its price. Nonetheless, nearly half of the coffee sold in the UK is Robusta, and even in Italy, a country which celebrates its coffee culture like no other, a third of the coffee drunk is Robusta, whilst nearly a quarter of the coffee drunk in the USA is Robusta. The country that has thus far remained most immune to its pernicious influence is Norway, where it is still virtually unknown. Of global coffee consumption today, one-third is of a low-quality coffee variety that scarcely existed a century ago, and the proportion is growing. We are witnessing the triumph of the ‘practically worthless bean’ in our coffee cups. At the same time, ironically, with prices at their current levels of 35 cents per pound, Robusta coffee is even more practically worthless than its Arabica cousin.
Despite its widespread use, this black sheep in the coffee family receives an almost total informational blackout when coffee companies come to describe their wares. There are no illustrated pamphlets extolling the virtues of Togolese Robustas over those of Uganda, no analyses of the typical flavour characteristics of the Cameroon variety. Whereas many companies might draw attention to the fact that their blends are ‘100 per cent Arabica’, few would proudly point out that they use 50 per cent Robusta. This is simply because all coffee professionals know that Robusta coffee is a cheaper, inferior type and are unwilling to admit that they have any association with it. Arguably, if consumers really understood the extent to which their coffee has become tainted by this parvenu coffee bean, they would turn away in droves. Even so the creeping infiltration of cheap Robustas into mainstream blends is noticeable. What might once have been a reasonable coffee from a vending machine has changed over the last few years into an unpalatable, caffeine-kicking monstrosity. It seems, however, that many consumers are largely unaware of the change, although there is some evidence to suggest that the additional caffeine content of coffee with a higher proportion of Robusta is leading to a drop in consumption.
If proto-humans had experienced Arabica coffee in their highland fastness it would have been in its raw form, whereas today it is used almost exclusively after roasting – so much so that most people outside the coffee trade would be hard pressed to say what a green (raw) coffee bean looks like. The almost miraculous, quasi-alchemical transformation of coffee in the roasting process can be created easily enough in the home: all that is required is a large handful of unroasted green coffee beans and a large cast-iron frying pan preheated (but not oiled) on a hot ring. Stirred constantly with a wooden spatula, within minutes the beans acquire a golden hue. Occasionally, sputterings of complaint can be heard, an odd explosion like that of corn popping, caused by steam expanding within the cell structure of the bean. The heat starts to transform the unpromising, torpid vegetable matter into that wonderful substance, roasted coffee. Some smoke, heavy with oil and moisture, clambers limply from the pan, and the beans patchily break past their golden threshold and acquire a brownish tinge. The explosions become more frequent, and the occasional bean flies out of the pan. The dull brown beans now turn rich brown and oily, and the aroma of the smoke that pours from them is like incense for the gods themselves. Finally, amidst a profusion of popping and smoke, the process has to be stopped quickly to prevent the oily beans blackening into worthless soot. This is best accomplished by pouring the coffee between two metal colanders outside in fresh cool air. Clouds of white chaff (the detached remains of the silverskin) waft into the breeze. The sound of the roasted beans will strike the ear, brittle but curiously strong. After a few minutes, the beans will cool, and voilà! – roasted coffee, perhaps one of the most dramatic transformations of a natural plant product that human intervention has yet devised solely for its pleasure. After ten minutes or so the beans are ready to be ground; the aroma then released is extraordinary, rich and sublime. Roasted coffee contains over eight hundred separate flavour and aroma components, most of which form in the crucible of the roaster. This strange alchemy accounts in part for the hold that coffee exerts over our imagination.
As well as being uniquely endowed with early men and early coffee, Ethiopia was home to another drug, namely qat or khat (Catha edulis), a psychoactive plant containing cathinone and cathine, which is greatly appreciated on both sides of the Red Sea today, but particularly in Yemen, where it represents a third of that country’s Gross Domestic Product. Qat induces a mild euphoria, alertness, and tranquillity, and is widely consumed in convivial communal qat chewing sessions which frequently take all afternoon, meandering conversations punctuated by poetry and hypnotic pauses. While it is interesting that Ethiopia should offer two notable drugs amongst its indigenous plants, judging by its effects, qat would seem the less likely cause of the ‘brain explosion’. It is also less exportable, as the active ingredients are susceptible to rapid decay, and only fresh leaves produce good results. Caffeine is, by contrast, almost indestructible, surviving the ordeal by fire, pulverization and oxygen deprivation which the coffee industry routinely inflicts on it for prolonged periods with no apparent diminution of its powers.
Setting aside the tempting but unproven image of coffee as an evolutionary catalyst, it nonetheless needs to be explained how coffee came into common use. Remains of many of the plants that were domesticated by mankind early in prehistory turn up in archaeological digs, allowing a plausible timescale and map for the spread of many plants to be developed. It can be asserted with some confidence that the domestication of plants – that is, the selective breeding of plants from their wild forbears to encourage characteristics most useful to man – began with cereals in about 8500 BC in the so-called Fertile Crescent, an area that encompassed the modern-day Mediterranean Near East, southern Turkey, and northern Iraq. The techniques and practice of cultivation quickly spread to areas with a comparable climate, and gave rise to the earliest civilizations – ancient Egyptians, for example, cultivated wheat, grapes, peas, beans, and barley, all of which depended on winter’s rains and shorter daylight hours.
In the Ethiopian Highlands specific indigenous plant species flourished that were used to summer rains, and even daylight hours throughout the year, as well as the lower temperatures that came with altitude. While coffee and qat remained wild, some of these other plants were domesticated, including teff (a tiny-seeded cereal used for enjera bread), noog (used for seed oils), ensete (a banana-like plant used for bread), and finger millet used for beer. Remarkably, for a plant that is now cultivated throughout the tropical world, coffee has not been shown by archaeology to have been domesticated before the sixteenth century. In fact, history is almost silent on all aspects of coffee cultivation and consumption in Ethiopia, with the exception of anthropologists’ reports of coffee being used, as already noted, for ‘chewing and blood-brotherhood ceremonies’ by the Buganda tribes, and in the ‘slaughtering of the coffee’ ceremony, in which the Oromo celebrated the birth of cattle or children. The Oromo, the tribes who inhabit the corner of south-west Ethiopia where coffee originated, considered coffee to be the buna qala – the tears of Waqa, the supreme sky god. It was believed that coffee destroyed cattle, so in the ceremony coffee was roasted, along with barley, in butter: the symbolic union of coffee and cow thus propitiating the guardian spirits, reaffirming life, stimulating procreation and all manner of useful things. It has been reported anecdotally that coffee mixed this way with butter was also eaten by soldiers,
