A few weeks ago I wrote about what creates the flavours of coffee – the sugars, acids, oils, and caffeine. Even the heat of the coffee affects how we perceive the flavour. This week, I’ll try to explain why Arabica beans are considered the most flavoursome.
About two-thirds of the world’s coffee production is Arabica. It is thought by most drinkers to be more flavoursome than the other beans because it has more sugar, more oil, more acid and less caffeine. The sugar makes the coffee feel better in our mouth and the higher oil content gives it a better flavour.
Arabica beans are more difficult to grow and the plant usually produces less beans. It is naturally low in caffeine which is toxic to most insects, so Arabica plants are more vulnerable to insects. As a result, Arabica is usually grown at higher altitudes because the colder climate deters insects. The altitude range of between 1000 and 2000 metres above sea level seems to be ideal for growing the Arabica plants.
This higher altitude means the coffee’s cherries ripen more slowly and this means the sugars in the cherries develop more slowly. This allows the farmers to harvest the cherries at the optimum time, when the sugar levels are highest. The higher altitude also means Arabica beans have a higher acidity level, which gives coffee its fresh taste and feel in the mouth, the same way freshly-picked fruit feels and tastes. The higher acidity in just-picked fruit gives it the taste and feel that we perceive as ‘fresh’. The same sensory perception applies to Arabica coffee.
And that’s what’s so special about Arabica coffee beans.
The Long Road from Kandahar by Sara MacDonald is an interesting and engaging read, tracing the lives of an English boy and a Pakistani boy and their families.
The Long Road From Kandahar by Sara MacDonald
Finn is English, the son of a British Army Major and a Finnish mother. Raza is the son of an elderly, retired Taliban fighter, now a simple farmer in Waziristan, North-West Pakistan. Finn’s family live in their Army quarters in Germany, but he attends a boarding school in Cornwall. Raza lives with his elderly father in a simple house in the mountainous Swat Valley where he tends a goat herd and struggles to grow enough food during a drought.
Knowing that Raza’s two elder brothers will soon try take him for the Taliban, Raza’s father has secretly arranged for Raza to live with distant, wealthy relatives in London. After a short and unhappy stay in London, Raza wins a scholarship to the same boarding school in Cornwall that Finn attends where they are roommates and soon become close friends. They spend much of their non-school time at Finn’s grandparents’ beach house.
Finn’s father, Ben, is posted to Lashkar Gah in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province, about a thousand kilometres from Raza’s home village in Pakistan. Finn’s mother, Hanna, is desperately unhappy at the prospect of returning alone to Germany and moves back to her home in Finland, beginning what Finn believes to be his parents’ eventual separation/divorce. Raza and his new parents make an emergency return trip to Pakistan because his elderly father is hospitalised. Initially, Raza is determined to stay to care for his father but is soon convinced to return to England after the threat of being kidnapped/recruited into the Taliban by his older brothers becomes evident. While Raza is in Pakistan, Finn’s father is seriously injured during a patrol and is evacuated back to England. Ben’s injuries include an amputated leg and an abdominal wound. Hanna flies to England but it’s clear the marriage is over, causing Finn even more grief. Raza returns and joins the extended family as it comes to terms with Ben’s injuries. There is a vivid paragraph in which Raza describes similar limb amputation injuries among Pakistani children and the reader can’t help to make the obvious comparison between the massive resources available to foreign troops compared to what limited medical treatment the local children have available.
This was a difficult story to read. It was principally about the eventual breaking apart of Finn’s family, but it could have been a more interesting story of the destruction of poor Pakistani families and their culture by the war between the Taliban and western powers that overflows into Waziristan. The story, like the real situation in Afghanistan, was tipped heavily towards the story of Finn, his English life and his English family’s response to Army life and Ben’s injury.
The book is set in both Cornwall and the northwest tribal area of the Swat Valley and Islamabad/Rawalpindi. These are vividly colourful and vital places and I thought the writing didn’t do either setting justice. The dialogue, almost all of which is between friends and family members, didn’t flow as naturally as it would in real life. I enjoyed reading the story and was thoroughly engaged with the characters, but I thought the focus of the story was off-centre. The story seemed predominantly about Finn, his relationship with his family, Ben’s injuries and the eventual break up of the marriage and family, when I thought a more compelling story was that of Raza leaving his mountains, travelling to bustling, dusty, edgy Peshawar, on to Rawalpindi and then to an utterly new and unexpected life in England.
Arthur Delaney didn’t think he was able to raise his three children after his wife died so he allowed himself to succumb to religious/righteous pleas to fight for the Union Army – and to place his three children into the care of an orphanage owner. The war and three years in a prisoner-of-war prison changed his outlook on life and his opinion about raising his children. When released, Delaney set out to find his children, restore his family, and make things right again. The orphanage owner, though, had indentured the children as farm workers and house servants. And as they had been sold on to other farms and households around Canada, his children’s locations are unknown. Arthur Delaney begins a 20 year journey/adventure throughout Canada’s eastern and maritime provinces, chasing down rumours and information to find his children,
The book could easily have been called The Adventures and Psychological Torment of Arthur Delaney and while a lot of the book focuses on the interesting characters and settings of the journey, the author manages to keep Delaney’s torment/self-punishment and the goal of finding his children at the core of the story.
The writing is easy to read and flows well. The reader is given a clear sense of the simplicity of living conditions and the harsh climate in eastern Canada in the late 1800s as well as the economic struggle experienced by most. It was a relatively short/quick read and the author could well have enriched the story by telling us more about each of the three children’s struggles, initially in the orphanage and then in their respective placements. And maybe more of the orphanage owner’s story and the motivations behind her decisions. Nonetheless, I thoroughly enjoyed this book and was fully absorbed by both the story and the writing. I certainly came to care enough about the characters to want a happy ending.
Lingering notes A few days after finishing the book I’m still left with a clear feeling of the hard life experienced post Civil War, the lack of gratitude for the sacrifices made by Delaney, and his tenacity to continue the search to apologise and make things right for his family.
The Secret of Karabakh by Fidan Bagirova is a cleverly-crafted blend of action thriller and historical fiction with credible characters in an authentic setting. As much as the several settings are vital to the story, the characters are the real stars.
The Secret of Karabakh by Fidan Bagirova
Alana Fulton, the daughter of wealthy Americans is a devoted student of archaeology completing her PhD at Cambridge University when she becomes the subject of both a police investigation and sinister stalkers. After her university rooms become the centre of a terrorist incident and then investigation, she receives an anonymous note warning her that she is in danger.
Her movie-star boyfriend becomes the subject of the police investigation and while on the run the pair are attacked by strangers who seem to be foreign. Alana begins to distrust her boyfriend when he confesses to receiving diamonds in return for protecting her. They escape the police investigation by private jet to Switzerland but their attackers follow. After a Bond-esque chase scene, Alana travels to Azerbaijan. Threaded through the action thriller is a gradually-evolving story of Alana’s real identity and real personal history.
Also slowly revealed are the personal perspectives from the Nagorno-Karabakh war between Azerbaijan and Armenia – a real and relatively recent and still unresolved conflict over territory, natural resources and cultural histories.
Rescued from near-death in Gstaad, Switzerland, Alana is given an ever-so-brief explanation of her real family origins before being whisked from Geneva to Baku, Azerbaijan. She is reunited with her grandfather, once the landlord/tribal leader of Karabakh now living in exile in Baku. Alana yearns to return to her homeland to untangle and clarify jumbled and vague memories of her terrifying childhood experiences of the war and fleeing from invading troops. From here, the story accelerated, the danger and courage, in equal measures, increased, as did the urgency of my reading. I quickly read through the last hundred or so pages to the satisfying conclusion.
Lingering notes A few days after finishing The Secret of Karabakh I am remembering the high quality of writing, judicious combinations of dialogue and description of action to create a sense of pace, and the inclusion of so much accurate history that gave the book its meaning, as well as a vivid sense of place. I’m also left with clear feelings about the characters – the evil of some, the depth and devotion of others, and the courage and determination repeatedly shown by Alana.
The Journey by Conrad Jones is the story of Kalu, a UK-trained doctor living in Monguno, Northern Nigeria and his family. Kalu, Esse, his wife, and 4 children, become refugees when Boko Haram overruns Monguno. These early scenes are not for the faint-hearted – guns, machetes, rape, burning…
Kalu has been making secret preparations for such an event and he quickly gathers his family in his surgery, distributes necessary supplies and money among them. They escape, initially at night and on foot, through the forest surrounding the town. They find the Land Cruiser that Kalu had hidden earlier and so the long, dangerous journey begins. The danger comes at the family in many forms: Boko extremists who race ahead of the invasion, corrupt border guards, other desperate refugees also trying to escape, and simple opportunists. But they’re also helped by sympathetic well-wishers. Ultimately, Kalu and his family make it to the Libyan coast where they board a trawler to cross the Mediterranean to Italy. The boat capsizes, the family is separated and… I’ll stop there rather than spoil the story’s ending.
The plot races along giving the reader a tiny sense of the desperation the family must feel as it remains just ahead of danger. The story mostly focuses on Kalu and Esse with their children’s characters not being developed in as much detail as I’d have liked. It was an engaging and ultimately satisfying read with several twists and threads to keep track of and wonder about.
Lingering notes Recently I was reading about the taste of coffee and encountered the term ‘lingering notes’ which describes the tastes that remain long after the coffee has been drunk. I wondered whether ‘lingering notes’ are a combination of the taste and memories associated with it. I wondered if the same applies to a book because I finished The Journey several days ago and am well into my next book, but I have ‘lingering notes’ about it. Kalu’s family was incredibly fortunate to have survived the initial attack on their town by Boko Haram, incredibly fortunate to have made the necessary and substantial preparations to be able to escape, and incredibly fortunate to have escaped from Boko Haram. I know it’s ficton, but I like fiction to be ‘at least possible or plausible’. That has been one lingering note for me. Another is that The Journey had several incomplete threads: the attack on the Christian community, the attack on the town’s village and the people’s lives afterwards, and perhaps even some back story of some of the Boko Haram fighters – who are/were they and why are they as they are now? All of which is to say that while The Journey was a fast-paced story, it felt incomplete because the story of any refugee fleeing their home and risking everything is a complex story with many perspectives and deserves to be told fully. These are my ‘lingering notes’.
Books and beans 