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Coffee and reading have a long and lively companionship. Unlike sluggish beer or giddy wine, coffee energizes the body and stimulates the mind. Coffee is the drink for people who like clear thinking, good conversation, good writing and good reading. It's no coincidence that Starbucks likes to place its coffee shops near bookstores, and it's no coincidence that bookstores often include coffee bars. Coffee and reading go together.

You can crow coffee at home  We actually did this. These photos are of plants that we grew up north, around the 42nd parallel. You can do this, so long as you bring the plants indoors in winter. It takes about four years for a seedling to grow to a flowering coffee plant, so growing your own coffee does take patience. Coffee plants display shiny green leaves all year round, which is certainly a happy sight in mid-winter, and after the first four years the plants miraculously produce small white sweet-scented flowers and, sure enough, coffee beans.

There are essentially two types of coffee beans, arabica and robusto. Robusto beans contain more caffeine than arabica beans, but they have a less pleasing flavor — some call it plain bitter. Mass market coffee, the kind sold in grocery stores and served in many restaurants, is often robusto. But the coffee offered in self-respecting cafés and fine coffee shops is generally arabica. If you decide to grow coffee plants —  have some fun, why not? —  choose arabica; the flavor will be better and since the flowers self-pollinate, you’ll save yourself a world of trouble.

Coffee Flowers  The photograph on the left shows the small white blossoms of the coffee plant. The fruit of each flower will be a green coffee bean. When the photo was taken it was still too cold to take the plants outside If it had been taken in the tropics, there would be masses of those flowers.




Coffee Beans  When coffee beans begin to grow they're as green as the coffee plant’s leaves, but as they ripen they turn red, a brilliant cherry red and, in fact, they're called coffee cherries. The flowers blossom over a period of time, and the green fruit turns red over a span of time as well, so that ripe and unripe coffee beans grow side by side.


Cherries  The inside of the coffee cherry is filled with a soft, squishy pulp, and inside that pulp is the coffee bean we're looking for — somewhat like the peach stone inside the ripe peach. That interior "bean" is more precisely called a "seed" but we may as well call it a bean, everyone else does. It's a pale, washed-out green color, as you can see in the photo below.


Getting to the coffee bean  Commercial growers have a variety of ways of getting the coffee bean out of the cherry. If you're growing coffee at home you can simply peel open the cherries and remove the bean. You're not gong to have so many cherries that you won't be able to do them one at a time.


Congratulations!  Four years have passed and you have your first harvest of coffee beans. Now, as you roast the coffee beans oil will come to the surface, giving them a shiny brown color, and the air will fill with the wonderful aroma of roasting coffee. Bliss! Next you grind the beans, pour boiling water through the grounds, and you're ready for that mug of coffee. Yes, yes, we know. This doesn't exactly make you independent of Starbucks. But it's a start. Go find a good book to read, enjoy your coffee.

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Post Script — A History of the World in 6 Glasses, the book by Tom Standage, has an excellent section on coffee. The author shows how six different drinks -- beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, Coca-Cola -- have had a surprisingly deep influence on the course of history and culture. Every drink has its place, of course, but stay-awake readers with nimble minds who love coffee will be delighted by what Standage has to say about their favorite drink. You can jump to our review of this lively book by clicking on A History of the World in 6 Glasses.

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