Before and After - Coffee Roasting

Coffee is a brewed beverage with a dark, acidic flavor prepared from the roasted seeds of the coffee plant, colloquially called coffee beans. The beans are found in coffee cherries, which grow on trees cultivated in over 70 countries, primarily in equatorial Latin America, Southeast Asia, South Asia and Africa. Green (unroasted) coffee is one of the most traded agricultural commodities in the world. Coffee can have a stimulating effect on humans due to its caffeine content. It is one of the most-consumed beverages in the world.

Coffee has played a crucial role in many societies. The energizing effect of the coffee bean plant is thought to have been discovered in the northeast region of Ethiopia, and the cultivation of coffee first expanded in the Arab world. The earliest credible evidence of coffee drinking appears in the middle of the 15th century, in the Sufi shrines of Yemen in southern Arabia. From the Muslim world, coffee spread to India, Italy, then to the rest of Europe, to Indonesia, and to the Americas. In East Africa and Yemen, it was used in religious ceremonies. As a result, the Ethiopian Church banned its secular consumption, a ban in effect until the reign of Emperor Menelik II of Ethiopia. It was banned in Ottoman Turkey during the 17th century for political reasons, and was associated with rebellious political activities in Europe.

A coffee bean is a seed of a coffee plant. It is the pit inside the red or purple fruit often referred to as a cherry. Even though they are seeds, they are referred to as 'beans' because of their resemblance to true beans. The fruits - coffee cherries or coffee berries - most commonly contain two stones with their flat sides together. In a crop of coffee, a small percentage of cherries contain a single bean, instead of the usual two. This is called a peaberry. Like brazil nuts and white rice, coffee beans consist mostly of endosperm .

The two most economically important varieties of coffee plant are the Arabica and the Robusta. 75-80% of the coffee produced worldwide is Arabica and 20% is Robusta. . Arabica beans consist of 0.8-1.4% caffeine and Robusta beans consist of 1.7-4% caffeine. . As coffee is one of the world's most widely consumed beverages, coffee beans are a major cash crop, and an important export product, counting for over 50% of some developing nations' foreign exchange earnings. The United States imports more coffee than any other nation . The average person in the United States consumed 4.09kg (9lbs) of coffee in the year 2009.

Scanography, also spelled scannography more commonly referred to as scanner photography, is the process of capturing digitized images of objects for the purpose of creating printable art using a flatbed "photo" scanner with a CCD (charge-coupled device) array capturing device. The term scanography formerly referred to medical scanning, but is unrelated in either purpose or technique. Fine art scanography differs from traditional document scanning by using atypical objects, often three dimensional, as well as from photography, due to the nature of the scanner's operation.