Travel around 2 be happy: Portugal: Centro de Ciência do Café (Coffee Science Centre)

Thursday, 5th May 2022

Returning home via Campo Maior, the heart of the coffee industry in Portugal.

First things first, we had lunch. We sat al fresco at the Municipal Garden. It's been a few years since I last had snails. I was so eager I almost inhaled them! Followed by a port sandwich drowned in mustard, of course!

Delta Cafés, founded by Rui Nabeiro in 1961, started very humbly but has become a multimillion company and revitalised the forgotten and small village of Campo Maior in the Alentejo. Rui Nabeiro has now dedicated quite a big warehouse to a museum celebrating coffee, just across the road from his factory.

The Coffee Science Centre is a museum dedicated to teaching about the production of coffee and coffee culture in Portugal. There's also a Barista Academy which I really need to check-out.

Entrance fee is €8 and although expensive for Portuguese standards, it is definitely worth it. It's packed with information delivered in easy to read and interactive ways.

A few facts I learned:

A coffee plant takes 4 years to reach maturity and can live for 60-70 years.
Coffee is the 2nd most traded product in the world immediately after oil.
Worldwide, per second, over 3000 cups of coffee are drunk.
The biggest consumers of coffee in the world are the Finnish consuming 12kg/person/year (2008). Norway, Iceland and Denmark come next. There's something in the Nordic weather...
The most expensive coffee is Kopi Luwak at $40-50/cup and €900/kg. What the museum doesn't say is that this coffee involves the partially digestion of the coffee berries by the Asian palm civet, aka civet coffee, meaning they are slaves of the Kopi Luwak coffee production.
A sack of coffee holds 60kg. Pretty heavy!
Brasil is, by far, the biggest producer of coffee in the world with 63 sacks of coffee in 2018/2019. They have been the biggest producers of coffee for the last 150 years. That's impressive!
I was surprised to find out that the 2nd biggest producer of coffee is Vietnam (really?!?) with less than half of Brasil's production at 31 sacks of coffee in the same year.
Brasil produces so much coffee that the import of green coffee grain is banned.
King João V sent an emissary, Francisco de Melo Palheta, to the French Guiana in 1727 to obtain the coffee plant from the Governor, but he got no luck. As he was about to quit, the Governor's wife handed him a bouquet of flowers with a hidden coffee plant. It is said that they had a 'close relationship'. It's from this single plant that the whole coffee industry bloomed in Brasil.
The Dutch were responsible for the introduction of the coffee culture in Europe, in the 17th century, and that was the beginning of the coffeehouses. In Portugal they were first known as 'botequins' before being called 'cafés' in the 19th century.
The espresso was born in 1901 when Luigi Bezzera invented a machine that allowed hot water to pass under pressure through grinded coffee grains. Achille Gaggia improved it. The perfect espresso is produced at 9 bars with 6.5g coffee and 30sec of extraction. That's very precise!
'Bica' is what the Lisbon locals call an espresso. The name derives from a poster in a café saying 'Beba Isto Com Açúcar' ('drink this with sugar').

There is an insane movie about the discovery of coffee in Ethiopia. It's insanely weird and it made us laugh.

There is an interactive photographic camera in which you seat on a coffee shop table and it projects in the background whichever coffeehouse you have selected. There were a few popular cafés in Portugal and we chose 'Martinho da Arcada' for our photo, an historic café in Lisbon opened in 1778. I decided to make it romantic.