It is no secret, Vineyard churches loves their freshly brewed coffee before the start of their services. Socialising is a big thing for us. We know that by putting a cup of coffee into someone’s hands it helps them relax and feel welcomed. But recently my love for a cup of coffee went to another level.
One Saturday morning my wife and I visited the London Coffee Festival in Brick Lane, London. Surrounded by hipsters and foreign students we entered into the strange, mystical world of coffee. I discovered just how amazing is the humble coffee bean and what it goes through to end up in our cups. So here’s how it gets to us.
Coffee trees are only grown above a certain sea level and in tropical regions. They also only start bearing fruit after 4-5 years. Interestingly, much of the world's coffee is grown by small farmers on five to seven acres of land and is harvested by hand.
After the ‘coffee cherries’ are picked they are ‘depulped’, a process that tears off the outer layer of the coffee flesh, exposing the two coffee seeds inside.
This is followed by a period of fermentation, which can take anything from four hours to three days depending on the country, altitude and humidity. The coffee is then dried, taking a further three to five days or almost two weeks, depending on weather. Only when the coffee has been dried down to 12% moisture and a thin shell, called parchment, encapsulates each coffee bean, can it be put into coffee sacks and be exported.
When the coffee reaches our shores it is delivered to roasting companies. Roasters need to have a strong attention to detail, excellent sensory skills and sensory memory. The goal in coffee roasting is to enhance the qualities of the green coffee beans and to develop them to their fullest potential.
The last stage of the journey is, of course, the café. This is where trained baristas come into their own. The coffee has to be ground just right and brewed at just the right pressure. The milk needs to be steamed, but not too hot - otherwise it can make the coffee taste acidic or bitter. And then, only then, can you sit down to enjoy it. You can’t help thinking that this is a lot of effort to get our daily ‘hit’! But grateful I am.
The world we live in is a humbling, awe-inspiring experience of beauty and grandeur. It is something to be savoured and tasted, again and again. We have learnt to take the earth’s riches and do incredible things with them - like make a cup of coffee.
In the first book of the Bible, Genesis, we see how God puts his full creativity to work in the world. Afterwards he reflects: “God saw all that he made was very good.” We get just around 800 words to describe this incredible act of love, but they are all words designed to permeate our hearts and imaginations and cause us to ponder deeply on our reason for being. And the more we do, the more significant our relationship with God becomes for us.
Just like your cup of coffee, life doesn’t just randomly happen to make itself, there is a creator behind it, along with a complex process filled with passion, love and dedication to the end user – us.
The philosopher Wittgenstein once poured a cup of freshly ground coffee and asked his students to describe the smell. When they failed Wittgenstein said, in effect: “If we haven’t got words to describe the smell of coffee which we can hold in a cup in our hands, how can we think we have the words adequately to describe God?”
This pretty much sums up my feelings of a loving God who feels passionate about bringing us the best, including sending us his son, Jesus. Happy drinking!
ASD
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