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Coffee Beans



Matthew Greenia
Flagpole Magazine
Athens, Georgia 30603
November 27, 1995


Dear Matthew,


Your Nov. 8, 1995, article Coffee Beans was informative but the information you failed to include caused me some momentary concern. You failed to report that Jittery Joe’s uses only shade grown arabica beans. The alarm bell was the mention of coffee from Costa Rica and Kenya Both of these countries are notorious for their production of sun grown robusta coffee.

A very pleasant conversion with Keith quickly allayed my fears. Keith assured me that he was aware of the problem and Jittery Joe’s only served shade grown arabica coffee.

The traditional coffee is shade grown arabica. The robusta was found growing wild in Zaire in 1898 but was not cultivated commercially until about 1950 when the demand for instant coffee required increased production. Mere coincidence that Dr. Sartori Kato developed an instant coffee in 1899? I think not!

The infamous W.H. Cowgill developed robusta hybrids that would grow in full sun in Guatemala. Costa Rica was the first country to adopt full sun coffee with the result that today almost all coffee from Costa Rica is sun grown. Robusta coffee is harsher than arabica and is generally considered inferior. Robusta does out produce arabica and in Brazil’s flat fields allows for mechanical picking. Robusta, however, puts the planter on the downward fertilizer insecticide spiral.

Sun grown robusta fields in Mexico, Central America and South America also destroy winter habitat for a third of the migratory birds that breed in the United States. A typical shade grown arabica field hosts up to 150 bird species plus 73 wildlife species and 66 species of trees. A sun grown robusta field is lucky if 50 species of birds visit.

On a lighter side, Java, which was forced to replace arabicas, destroyed by leaf rust, with robustas, has a unique coffee treat. The luak, a small nocturnal catlike animal, dines on only the choicest, ripest coffee cherries. The luak digests the fruit and expels the coffee beans which are carefully collected, washed, roasted and ground. The beans are cleaned by a fermentation process while in the luak’s stomach even faster than fermentation by the regular wet process. The Javanese refer to this coffee as Kopi luak and swear that it is superior to any coffee processed by either the dry or wet methods.

On an even lighter note, one attraction conspicuously missing from the Athens scene is a coffee sauna similar to the one at the Nishiarai Kouso Sauna Center in Tokyo. The friendly folks at this establishment will bury you to your neck in thirteen tons of soggy ground coffee heated to 140°F by fermenting pineapple pulp. The price for this service in the 1980’s was ¥2,000 for thirty minutes and worth every yen.

I think used coffee grounds would suffice and the Righteous Juice Company and others could contribute various fruit pulps to fuel the thing.



Richard E. Irby, Jr.


cc:Keith/Jittery Joe’s


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