Coffee and chicory

by P. L. Simmonds

Aden, alias Mocha, coffee is, along with the other coffees of the Red Sea, sent first to Bombay in Arab ships, where it is “garbelled” (picked), previously to its being exported to England. The bean is always broad and small, and the climate of India is supposed to improve its flavour. The seed of the Berbera (Abyssinian) plant is usually called long-berried Mocha.

The Java and East Indian, next in quality, are larger, and of a paler yellow. The Ceylon berries are of irregular sizes, ill-shaped, and of a spotted dirty cream-colour. The terms “Plantation” and “Native” coffees, as applied to Ceylon berries, are distinctions arising from one being the cultivated coffee of the estates of the planters, which are better attended to and prepared for market, while the other is that grown in a wild or careless manner by the natives about their dwellings, and more rudely prepared. Java coffee is chiefly prized in the market for its delicacy of flavour, but in point of strength it falls short of the West Indian.

Of Bourbon coffee there are in commerce two qualities, fine and ordinary. The first is in small seeds, well selected for size, of a variable colour, yellow or green, with little pellicle, the furrow slightly indented, and it has a sweet odour. The second is badly assorted as regards form and colour, and its odour less agreeable.

The Jamaica coffee-berry is medium-sized, of a greenish blue colour, rather oblong, and smooth to the touch. It has a strong, agreeable smell, and excellent flavour, and when carefully picked and sorted, fetches about the highest price of any kind.

Porto Rico is a middle-sized coffee, of a pure and agreeable flavour; the colour of the better sorts is a bluish green; and of the common, yellow.

The West Indian and Brazilian coffees have a bluish or greenish-grey tint. This grey-green shade of the Western coffees is entirely deficient in those of Asia. The value of the berry in our wholesale markets is not, therefore, a fictitious quality, as some imagine, but is real, and depends first upon the texture and form of the berry or seed, secondly on the colour, and thirdly the flavour. The texture of the berry and form, termed “style” by the coffee brokers, is so well defined and palpable to the initiated, that at one view they pronounce its value, from one hundred and thirty shillings per cwt. downwards, according to the two other qualities, colour and flavour.

The value of the coffees usually imported into this country stands in the following order: Mocha, fine Ceylon Plantation, Jamaica, Costa Rica, Java, Tellicherry, and St. Domingo.

Portugal produces coffee in several of her colonies. Ordinary description, yellowish berry, in St. Thomas; tolerably good in the Cape de Verdes; bad, yellow, in Timor; worse (but curious from the very small size of the berry), growing wild, in Mozambique; good in Angola; and of excellent quality in Madeira and Porto Santo, but the production is limited.

Much of the coffee which finds its way into England as genuine Mocha is, in reality, Malabar coffee, sent to ports of the Persian Gulf from Bourbon, and when thus naturalised, finding its way to Europe. But the coffee of India even now competes successfully with that of Arabia, in Bussorah, and other local markets, which the latter had for centuries commanded as its own.

It is curious to watch the progress of English enterprise. The energetic and ubiquitous Anglo-Saxons hold India, and here we see coffee from India triumphing over the famous berry of Arabia. The cultivation of tea also is rapidly spreading over 30,000 square miles of the Sub-Himalayan ranges; and who knows but that Indian teas may yet compete with those of the flowery land in the markets of Shanghae?