I was once a coffee roaster at a facility that was connected to a retail outlet. The public was able to watch me work through a glass fire door that was never locked. Anyone who was bold enough to venture into the roastery was welcomed to stay and watch the entire process. It takes between 12 and 18 minutes for a small batch roaster to turn the hard green coffee beans into the sweet smelling, freshly roasted coffee that pulled people in off the highway.

It doesn’t take 12 minutes to explain the process in layman’s terms, so I had to develop some material to fill in the time. It had to be well rehearsed, so I could keep my mind primarily on the demands of the actual job. An annoying side effect of this is that now, whenever somebody rhymes off an interesting fact about coffee, it is usually something that I have rhymed off dozens of times in the past.

Gil Grissom on CSI once parlayed the details of a treasured Indonesian coffee that is made from beans that have been eaten and defecated by a small catlike nocturnal animal. I’m sure it was entertaining to anybody who didn’t already know about it. I still want to try some of that.

What? They wash them off.