So, I realize not everyone is a lover of coffee like myself. In fact, I don't personally know anyone else who writes a blog about coffee, but I do personally know people who drink it every single day in many forms. Drip, espresso and instant (yup, and now Starbucks is selling instant) and even other stuff that's supposed to taste like coffee -- remember Postum? My buddy has got a whole warehouse of that stuff -- he got it back during the cold war, just in case...now it's referred to as the Postum Cold War era. He doesn't believe me when I tell him it's not coffee. He thinks I'm making a dig...that because it's instant, it's not real. But it contains NO COFFEE dumbass...
Anyway, everyone I know and most likely, you know is drinking mainly one kind of coffee really -- Arabica. Arabica beans have about half the amount of caffeine as Robusta beans, but Robusta beans are about 10x (ten times) more bitter than your average Arabica bean which is why it is very difficult to find a pure Robusta roasted coffee at the store. In actuality most of the espresso blends have both Arabica and Robusta for that extra kick.
Robusta coffee trees take less time to grow and have great value to the farmer for this reason. However, they will not be able to fetch the same price as an Arabica farmer. So it behooves the farmer to harvest some combination of both.
I love the end product, I'm not an expert on growing coffee, but this kind of thing is interesting to me and if you want to know more, here are a couple good little links:
Wikipedia: Robusta Coffee
TheOatmeal: 15 Things Worth Knowing About Coffee
Back to the brew...
