Coffee has become as much a part of our culture as tea ever was but making a good cup is harder than it looks and how healthy is this 21st Century obsession anyway?

By the end of today the UK will have drunk another 70 million cups of coffee, some of it good, some bad and some just plain ugly. But you don’t have to hunt out the world’s best barista (coffee chef) to enjoy a good cup of ‘Joe’. Armed with a little bit of knowledge and some neat tricks you can navigate your way to coffee heaven.

The Bean
While there are over 6,000 species of coffee plant, the three most commercially available are liberia, robusta and arabica. Arabica is a more delicate plant, which grows at higher altitude and is therefore more expensive. Arabica gives more flavour when roasted at a lower temperature but robusta is better with a stronger roast. The two are often blended and given a medium roast to allow both flavours through.

It’s worth remembering that coffee oxidises and loses its flavour pretty quickly. Once ground, coffee loses flavour after one day and any café worth its beans will only use coffee ground up to two hours before in its machines. Unground beans lose flavour after two weeks left to the air. So if you’re buying up bumper packs of ground coffee and sticking it in a big jar you’re probably wasting your time.

The Quest for a Perfect Cup
Serious coffee making begins with a shot of espresso, made in a pressurised coffee machine. There is an art to espresso making, developed and practised by Italian baristas. This is the building block from which the bewildering high-street array of Americanos, Macchiatos and Skinny Double Latte decafs is born.

For the uninitiated, a cappuccino is a long espresso, with one-third hot water and one-third frothed milk. An Americano is two shots of espresso topped up with hot water. A mochiatto is an espresso with a dash of milk foam on top. For the aficionados a ristretto is a shortened, more intense espresso.

A good espresso will always have a hazlenut-coloured crema on top, which is made from microscopic bubbles of coffee oil and does not disappear when the coffee is stirred. This suspended froth also contains many of the nutrients available in the coffee beans.

When the ground coffee is tamped into the machine’s cup it must be packed in hard enough so that the water is forced through the coffee, extracting the crema, but not so hard that this process takes too long and burns the coffee. During their training a barista will time how long it takes to pour the shot of espresso from the machine. For a 14-gram ‘double shot’ of coffee a 20-22 second pour is optimum.

When it’s made well an espresso is smooth, rich and not at all bitter. If your coffee tastes ‘briny’ or salty it’s been heated excessively after brewing (canteen coffee). The sharp, refreshing quality tasted at the tip of the tongue is called acidity, but coffee is low in actual acidity so if yours is giving you gut-ache then something has gone very wrong.

Health boost or bind?
But whatever you call its varieties is this carnival of caffeine really good for you? Leaving the stimulant issue to one side coffee is one of the best available sources of health-restoring antioxidants in our diets. Sure, pomegranates and cranberries contain plenty of them too but it’s not that easy to grab a mugful of them on your way to work.

And scientific studies have shown that even with the caffeine coffee can have some unexpected health benefits. Recent studies indicate that coffee drinkers are 50 per cent less likely to develop liver cancer and diabetes. It seems to protect men against Parkinson’s disease. Caffeine has also been shown to prompt the body to use fat cells for energy during exercise.

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