The world runs on coffee!

Sheel

The aroma of coffee wafts from a cup of steaming hot, frothy filter coffee. I breathe in deeply: my day has officially begun.

Coffee is a stimulant that millions of people begin their day with: its taste and flavour make it the most popular drink in the world after water. Its journey from Kaffa (Kefa) in Ethiopia to households across the globe offers a great opportunity for a project to engage your students in. Here are some ideas that you can explore with your students over the space of a week. Scale activities up or down depending on the needs of your class. Although they are organized in a specific way here, you can use them the way you choose.

Day 1: The stuff of legend
Legend has it that around the 15^th century, an Ethiopian shepherd named Kaldi found his goats lively and frolicsome after eating some red cherries. He tried them himself and felt a sense of exhilaration. He took some cherries to the monks of the local monastery, who initially threw them into the fire, calling them the work of the devil. The story goes that, taken by the aroma of the roasted beans, they ended up brewing the beans into a beverage and drinking it.

The truth may be somewhat different: people of this region might have been making wine out of the coffee cherries for years before. By the 16^th century, the knowledge of this drink had spread into the Arabian Peninsula, Egypt, and other parts of North-eastern Africa. Wild coffee plants from Kaffa were even taken to Yemen and other southern parts of Arabia and cultivated there. The drink made with it was called qahhwah-ul-bun (wine of the bean) or quawah for short.

It was in Yemen that roasted beans were first used to make a beverage. With the Ottoman conquest of Arabia, coffee became a popular brew: so popular that it began to be offered in quawah khaneh – coffee houses which became places of social activity and entertainment. The first coffee house is said to have opened in Istanbul in 1555.

Coffee came to India in the 16^th century from Yemen. A Sufi saint named Baba Budan from Chikkamagalur in Karnataka had travelled from India for the Haj. He brought seven coffee beans to India from the port of Mocha. The seeds were planted, the plant prospered and the region is replete with coffee plantations till today! The brew has since become a staple of South Indian households.

Activity 1: Kaffa or Kefa is an Ethiopian province. Get your students to look it up on the world map. Where is it located? What are the geographical features of this province?

Activity 2: Baba Budan had gone to Mecca, but Mocha is the place from where he brought the coffee seeds. Where is Mocha? Why was this an important place? Can the students trace the route of the coffee plant from Kaffa to India?

https://teacherplus.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Web-banner-link-bound-set.pdf

Activity 3: South India is famed for its ‘kaapi’: one brand even proclaims that, “Indian filter coffee [i.e., kaapi] is not just a cultural statement. It is the very essence that helps you connect with yourself in the mornings.”* Get the children to find out what exactly kaapi is and how it is made. If possible, arrange for an in-class demonstration of the process right from the powder to the finished coffee in a dabara set. You could even take them on a field visit to a local coffee store where beans are freshly powdered. What is the role of chicory in kaapi?

Activity 4: The coffee fruit grows in bunches, like many berries do. What makes it a cherry? Get the children to find out the differences between berries and cherries. You could also get them to compare various other fruits and distinguish between berries and cherries.

Day 2: From cherry to cup
Ingesting the red coffee cherries caused Kaldi’s goats to prance around. Surprisingly, though, the pulp of the fruit contains less caffeine than the seeds. It is the seeds from which coffee beans are obtained. So how is the brew we drink made?

The process begins, of course, with coffee cultivation. Coffee plants are grown on hill slopes in cool tropical regions. The coffee plant begins to flower 3-4 years after it is planted. The flowers are white and grow in bunches close to the branch. The fruit, like most others, is green in the beginning and when ripened is a brilliant red or yellow, depending on the variety. The ripe cherries are picked and sorted through a process of soaking them in water. The cherries with good seed sink to the bottom while defective one’s float and are removed. The cherries then go through a process called milling by which the fleshy layer is removed. The seeds are then dried. Flawed seeds are removed by picking. Once dry, the outer papery layer called parchment is removed to get the coffee beans, at this stage called green beans. Different sizes of beans are separated through sieving. The beans are then roasted and ground into powder, after which they can be used to brew the coffee. Here’s an instructive video you can use to show children how coffee is produced (on a tiny scale): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qfjLCOXMMg. Older children could also be asked to watch a video on the commercial production of coffee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=M0VWroX0gZA.

The taste of coffee varies not only by the species of coffee and its blend, but also by the altitude at which the plant is grown, the ripeness of the fruit and the method by which the bean is processed. Not only this, the way the coffee is brewed, the ratio of additives and additional flavours added to it make for a wide range of coffees.

Coffee has even found its way into other eatables, such as chocolate and ice-cream.

Activity 5: Coffea arabica and Coffea canephora (commonly known as robusta) are the two main species of coffee grown in the world. But there are over 100 species of the coffee plant. Middle school children could be asked to find out the names of a few other species of coffee. You could also ask them where the species name arabica comes from – it could lead to a lesson on how biological species are named.

Activity 6: Depending on class level, children could map the coffee growing areas of the world and mark where the world’s finest coffees come from.

Activity 7: Children from the primary classes could find out about the coffee that their parents or other family members drink at home (for instance, instant or filter coffee). What is the brand of coffee used? The pack (or bottle) size? The price? This information could be collated in class to enable children to compare costs and estimate the cost of a cup of coffee.

Activity 8: Older ones could work in groups and check what is available in cafés and restaurants around them. They could begin right from the school canteen – does it serve coffee in a cup or does it have a coffee dispensing machine? Some might already be familiar with terms like cappuccino, espresso, latte, mocha, frappe, etc., and various instant coffee mixes in sachets. What is the difference between each kind of coffee? What is decaf? What is the origin of these names? Children could also put together a chart comparing the prices of different kinds of coffee across these establishments. Which coffee is the most economical? Which the most expensive? If they had to buy a cup, which would they choose to buy and why?

Day 3: The coffee trade
Coffee became quickly popular wherever it went. Today, coffee is the most valuable commodity traded in the world after oil. Interestingly, it is traded in the form of beans, rather than the powder form in which most of us buy it. The reason is that it retains its flavour in the form of beans, but in powder form, its taste and flavour diminish quite quickly.

When did trade in coffee begin? We already know that coffee first went from Ethiopia to Arabia. In fact, coffee was first cultivated in Yemen as far back as the 15^th century. Travellers to Mecca like Baba Budan took coffee to far-off places. And just as it travelled to India, coffee went to Turkey, Syria, Egypt, and Persia. Imported into Europe from the Ottoman empire, quawah came to be known in Europe as the ‘Wine of Araby.’

Activity 9: Get your students to compare the words Kaffa, quawah, kahveh, koffie, and coffee. What about the word kaapi? What can they infer from this? You could draw a flowchart illustrating the linguistic path to the English word ‘coffee’: Kaffa (Ethipoia) >quawah (Arabian Peninsula) >kahveh (Turkey) >koffie (Netherlands) >coffee (England). Can they decipher the path along which coffee spread in Europe? Ask your students where they would place kaapi on this path – after the Turkish kahveh or the English coffee? Why? Also ask them: Why was coffee known as the Wine of Araby?

Coffee slowly replaced beer and wine as the drink to be had at breakfast, and by the 17^th century, coffee houses existed in various countries in Europe. The popularity of this drink caused the colonial powers to try and produce coffee for themselves. The Dutch were the first Europeans to set up plantations in their colonies in Indonesia and engage in large-scale trade in coffee. Soon, coffee was being grown on plantations in the colonies of England, France, Spain, and Portugal too. Slave labour went into these. In the 18^th century, St. Dominique (Haiti), a French colony in the Caribbean, grew more than 60% of the coffee that came to Europe. After the Haitian Revolution in 1791, in which the government of the time was overthrown and colonial plantation owners were put to death, the Portuguese turned Brazil into the world’s largest coffee producer – of course, using more slave labour. Brazil, an independent country now, remains the world’s largest producer of coffee today.

Activity 10: Brazil exported about 8.5 billion dollars of coffee in 2022. That’s less than 20% of the total coffee exports in the world. Children in middle school can find out who the top 10 exporters of the world were in 2022. How much coffee was exported in all by these countries? Where does India stand in terms of coffee exports?

Coffee is so well-liked that it has its own special day: International Coffee Day is celebrated on Oct 1 each year. The purpose? To raise awareness of the plight of coffee farmers, who, like workers in other industries, are generally poor and live a life of difficulty.

Activity 11: Slave labour helped produce coffee in the colonies. What other commodities were produced using slave labour? Get the children to look up such commodities as cotton, sugar, tobacco, and more. You could also tell them about goods that are produced for export in underdeveloped and developing nations today, and get them to debate whether slave labour still exists in other guises.

Day 4: Did coffee cause revolutions?
Coffee contains caffeine, a stimulant that boosts wakefulness and keeps one more alert. Its introduction had a profound effect on people, changing the way the world functioned. Replacing beer and wine as a breakfast drink made people more sober, helping them to think and work better (it’s still the reason why many working people choose to drink several cups of coffee a day!). Not only this, by pushing sleep away, it enabled the move to working longer hours, and thus helped fuel the Industrial Revolution. The New York Times goes as far as to suggest that Western capitalism is still a caffeine-fuelled enterprise.$ Did you know that over two billion cups of coffee are consumed each day around the world?

By the 17^th century, intellectuals were hanging out at coffee houses. In England, these coffee houses were sometimes called ‘penny universities,’ as admittance cost a penny, and people of various classes could meet, converse, and debate. King Charles II of England even went so far as to call the coffee houses ‘houses of sedition’ and tried in 1675 to ban them! He probably suspected that they had a role to play in the 1648 revolution in England, when his father King Charles I was overthrown and executed.

Coffee is said to be responsible for sparking revolutions across Europe in the mid-19^th century, as the first meetings were held in coffee houses. Soldiers drank coffee to boost their energy during the American Civil War too. In the first decade of the 20^th century, a Belgian immigrant to America named George Constant Louis Washington (different from the President George Washington) invented a way to manufacture instant coffee. Commercial production began in 1910, and it became a runaway success during World War I as soldiers in the trenches could make themselves a quick cup of ‘George Washington coffee’ whenever they needed it. During World War II, coffee was rationed for American civilians so that soldiers could have enough of it. Soldiers called this drink a ‘cuppa Joe.’

Activity 12: Guess what the world record for the largest cup of coffee might be. A 10-litre cup? 20? 30? 100? Get ready for a shock: it’s a whopping 22,739.14 litres! Get the children to find out the details of this creation.

Activity 13: The coffee house of yesteryears has morphed into the café of today. Starbucks, the largest coffee chain in the world, made its entry into India in 2012. As of 2023, it has over 300 stores across the country. Students could find out more about this chain depending on their class level from the menu of the café to its history.

The Boston Tea Party
The British drank a lot of coffee in the 17^th century, but this changed in the early years of the 18^th century. The East India Company, which could not match the Dutch and the Portuguese in the coffee trade, began trading in tea. The company monopolized the trade with China and sought to make it popular by cleverly building propaganda around it. Their strategies were so effective that the nation came to be known as a tea-drinking nation.

Tea was popular on the other side of the Atlantic, too. But in 1767, the British Parliament passed a law imposing duties on various products imported into the British colonies. The outcry against this law caused them to repeal it. However, a Tea Act was passed in 1773, handing the monopoly of tea to the East India Company. Bostonians rebelled against the law in December 1773 by throwing the tea that arrived on three ships (and was valued at 18,000 pounds) into the sea. Not only did this incident spark the American Revolution, but it caused a switch from tea to coffee. Drinking coffee became a sign of patriotism for the budding American nation!

Activity 14: The first coffee house in India – Indian Coffee House – was opened in 1936, and today boasts over 400 stores. Get the children to look up and compare this chain with Starbucks: how are they similar and in what ways are they different?

Activity 15: The two most popular breakfast drinks today are coffee and tea. Divide the children into groups. Depending on the class level, children could engage in a comparison of the two drinks, from doing a survey of family and friends to find out preferences to drawing out commonalities and differences. They could also look at word associations of the two, such as tea table / coffee table, tea break / coffee break, tea cup / coffee mug, etc. What differences does such nomenclature indicate?

Day 5: Coffee, coffee, everywhere…
As with other industries, coffee production does create a lot of waste: over 23 million tons of waste annually. This includes everything from the pulp removed from the coffee cherries to the used coffee grounds that we might be throwing into our dustbins. What can be done about it? The concept of sustainability is not new, with “Reduce, reuse, recycle” being a slogan that we are familiar with. At the level of the home, coffee grounds, like other organic waste, could be used in composting. The packaging material could be recycled. What about at the larger level?

Fortunately, many scientists and researchers the world over are making efforts to come up with some innovative solutions. Today, at least a small part of the waste is converted into usable products. Coffee grounds are being converted not just into compost but finding use as scrubs to revive skin and remove odours, as pest repellent, to produce plant-based polymers from which various objects can be made, and even dyes. Coffee waste can be used as an alternative fuel, and to produce biogas as well as to treat wastewater. The textile industry too has developed new technology that can utilize coffee grounds with to make garments. Of course, this is still a nascent industry.

Activity 16: Get the children to have a conversation with a neighbourhood café. How much coffee waste is being generated each day? How can this waste be collected and put to use?

Activity 17: As a fun activity to end the project, get the children to engage in coffee painting. A simple way to create a picture is demonstrated here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL_DjwiO0-g, while a more abstract one can be found here https://theartyteacher.com/abstract-coffee-art-home-learning-activity.

At the end of the week, the children could collate together and display all the learning they have gained and activities they have done.

*https://www.malgudidays.com.au/