The Londinium Glossary - Part II

Irish coffee: A marvelous Irish invention. Brewed coffee spiked with whisky & topped with cold whipped cream. Ideally, the coffee should be sipped through the cream and not mixed into it.

Monsooned coffee: In India green coffee beans are purposely exposed to the monsoon winds for several weeks, a process which moistens the beans and develops a distinctive flavour that in former times characterised beans after a long sea journey from India to Europe.

Dry-Processed: coffee beans dried in the sun, with little rinsing or sorting. Typically results in a poorly graded coffee, as a result of the impurities that remain mixed up with the beans. Dry-processed coffee beans are sometimes referred to as 'naturals'.

Green coffee beans: Fresh coffee beans that have been wet or dry processed, graded, and are ready to be roasted.

Organic coffee beans: coffee beans grown without chemical fertilisers or pesticides. Consumers should be aware that many small growers do not use chemicals anyway, simply because they can not afford them, but their product may not carry organic certification. This is particularly true for coffee grown at high altitudes where few insects or bugs may be present and therefore chemicals not really necessary, combined with very inaccessible terrain making it difficult for chemicals to be transported to the plantation, and of course poverty.

Washed coffee beans: wet-processed coffee beans, which are repeatedly rinsed and sorted. Because of this, washed beans are superior in quality to dry-processed beans.

Vacuum coffee maker: water is placed in a glass globe. A second glass globe is inserted into the top of the first, with a rubber seal binding them together & a unique glass rod acting as the filter. Medium ground coffee is placed in the upper globe. A heat source is placed under the lower glass globe. As the water in the lower glass globe expands it is forced into the upper globe. When all the water in the lower globe has been forced into the upper globe, the heat source is removed. The lower globe then cools, creating a lower pressure in the lower globe, than in the top globe, and so the coffee is sucked back down into the lower globe. The most famous and spectacular of these is the original one, being the Cona, from England.

Crema: the foam that gathers on the surface of a good espresso, being an emulsion of the essential oils contained in the coffee. For any given roast, the fresher it is, the more crema you will see on your espresso. It really is that simple. The crema should not be too pale in colour, nor should it be even close to approaching a chocolate colour. The colour of varnished pine is approximately the colour you should be targeting, or possibly a shade darker. The bubbles in the crema should be so fine that they are barely visible across the light.