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small farms by spreading the wet beans on outdoor patios or platforms, turning them occasionally by hand. Large estates employ huge tumbling commercial dryers for the task. Once dry, a final mechanical hulling removes the thin parchment that encases the seeds, somewhat like the papery skin inside a peanut. Some farmers—those in Yirgacheffe among them—still use the ancient “dry method,” by which the fruit is allowed to dry like a raisin in the sun, then is removed from the beans through a milling process. It’s harder to get consistent results this way, but when done with care, this sort of coffee is valued for its very complex and intense flavors.
    All of this work typically takes place in the coffee’s source country, usually near the farm, and in some areas even the smallest family farms do the processing themselves or in small cooperatives. Other growers rely on local businesses to buy the freshly picked cherries and process batches of local beans from many growers. But this is the one stage where coffee doesn’t wander very far from its tree. Adding too many travel miles at this stage would take too much time and reduce the grade of the coffee and therefore its price. So in the coffee world at least, the ancient rules hold for the freshly picked fruit: time and distance is the enemy, and no technology or shipping container or shiny outsourced factory can stop the spoilage and beat the clock.
    After processing, the beans are separated into as many as fourteen grades based on size, consistency, appearance, and quality, with the top grades going to the specialty coffee buyers such as Isais, and the rest to commercial buyers or instant coffee factories at a much lower price. The bottom grades are too poor to be exported and are consumed locally, if at all.
    There are dozens of people making decisions about how to handle each of the stages of gathering and processing, and an entire coffee lot can be ruined by any one of them. “That’s the truth of coffee,” Isais says. “It can never be made any better, but there are a thousand ways to make it worse along the way.”
    When the coffee emerges from the final milling as raw green beans, the rules governed by coffee’s fragility change: the green beans are sturdy and can last months, even a full year, with little or no care required. The green beans pass to agents and brokers who aggregate coffee from small lots in a region and sell to exporters, who deal with the coffee buyers and their brokers and agents worldwide. It’s a convoluted process, and it’s not unusual for coffee to pass through many ownership changes before reaching a consumer. Sometimes coffee can be purchased directly without all the middlemen, and this “estate coffee” is sold like a premium wine. The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf has been buying directly from the same coffee agent in Yirgacheffe for fifty years, Isais says, allowing it to obtain beans from the same estate of small landholders in the village near the birthplace of coffee.
    At the other end of the quality spectrum is a different variety of coffee, made from the plant Coffea canephora (or Coffea robusta ), commonly called robusta coffee. It’s grown primarily in Brazil and a relative newcomer to the coffee game, Vietnam, which has no significant arabica production. As the name implies, robusta is a heartier plant than arabica , less fussy about altitude and climate, perfectly happy to grow in flatlands wheremechanical picking is easy and cheap, and it even has 50 percent more caffeine. Robusta would be the perfect coffee for the modern world but for one thing: the taste. Most people find it bitter, biting, and far less appealing than arabica coffee.
    But like bad wine, robusta has its attractions: low cost. Its bargain prices make it a preferred choice for instant coffees, compensating for the added cost of the instant coffee process, which does not ruin coffee flavors in itself.