Continuing from last time, what do goats have to do with coffee?
So we got as far as goats eating coffee cherries. And hopefully you're wondering "what the heck is a coffee cherry?". If you are then good, you're just like we were the first time we discovered that coffee grows on shrubs. Unlike what we find packed into bags on the shelves that glorious bean goes through a few transformations until it becomes familiar.
The coffee bean starts its life was a cherry. Well, actually it's more the pit of a cherry. What the goats were munching on, and the goat herder I'm sure took notice and tried as well, was that these magic cherries contained a pretty good punch of caffeine.
After the cherry meat is cleaned away what's left is what we recognize as the coffee bean, only it's green. After processing where it's cleaned and dried these green beans go through one final step of roasting to bring out the personality of each bean. Since the beans are actually pits inside of coffee shrub cherries it's very common for high quality coffees to be naturally sweet, with fruity notes like, you guessed it, berries.
The roasting process is definitely a craft built on years of experience. There are dozens of chemicals within the bean that change state and sugars that caramelize bringing out that great taste that discerning palettes desire. What about the green beans you ask? Well of course we tried it, once, for obvious reasons it will remain as once. Bleh.
At which point did Mr. Goat Herder say that he loves the kick of caffeine but not so much the kick to his mouth from chewing unroasted beans? I'd take a guess that at some point people were sitting around a camp fire and someone spit one of the coffee beans into the fire and noticed the crack and crackle then the smoke sweeten to that familiar coffee roast smell.
Or of course it could have been aliens passing along the motivation for life, the universe, and everything. Alien goats that is.
