– A blog post by TENZING’s alchemist Aad Tervoort – 

We set out to harness, enjoy, and celebrate nature’s pure and abundant energy, because why cook up in a lab what can be found in our nature? Energy. It’s in our nature. It’s in ourselves; it’s all around us. We searched far and wide for the most effective, highest quality, natural ingredients. Only six made the cut — and green coffee is one of them. Here’s why.

For centuries, Ethiopian herdsmen had known of the beneficial effects of Coffea arabica, the evergreen shrub indigenous to the East African highlands. Early on, they brewed the leaves to make medicine; later, they made wine by fermenting the sweet pulp of the shrub’s berries. But it didn’t stop there. As legend has it, one day a herder named Kaldi saw his goats eating coffee berries; later, he noticed that they were frolicking more than usual in the meadow and didn’t sleep that night. Kaldi reported his discovery to the abbot of the local monastery. The abbott was curious; he made a drink from the berries and noticed that it enabled him to pray long into the night.

Soon everyone knew about the stimulating effects of chewing coffee berries; they made climbing  Ethiopia’s steep mountains seem like a walk in the park. People ground the berries, mixed them with animal fat, and pressed the resulting paste into small lumps that could be eaten during activities requiring great endurance. Someone discovered that the stimulating effect was concentrated in the seeds of the berries, so soon people were removing the seeds from the fruit and consuming them. Green coffee beans—the seeds of the berry—became a staple of the local diet.

Rumours of coffee beans’ stimulating effect spread far and wide; by the Middle Ages, they were well known in North Africa, Europe, and Turkey (the English word “coffee” and its equivalent in many other languages derives from the Turkish word qahveh). However, drinks made from green coffee beans were quite bitter; it was more like swallowing medicine than enjoying a tasty beverage. In the 12th century, it was discovered that roasting the beans for 20 minutes at a temperature of about 400ºF/200ºC gave them a milder, more aromatic taste. Brewing a drink from ground roasted coffee beans yielded a beverage that would eventually conquer the world.

Hundreds of years later, in 1819, a young student working in a sparse laboratory funded by the famous German poet and philospher Goethe (who had a keen interest in the natural sciences) isolated the substance that produced coffee’s stimulating effect. The student, Friedlieb Runge, coined the word Kaffein for the stimulant he discovered.

That’s all good, right? Well, almost. The roasting process—exposing coffee beans to high temperatures for prolonged periods—also produces small amounts of tarry resins that can be detrimental to our health. These harmful substances are absent from green coffee beans. By extracting the good stuff directly from raw beans, we avoid putting these resins into our product—and it makes the taste milder, too!

So using green coffee beans in a modern way actually brings us full circle, back to ancient Ethiopia, where people simply chewed the raw beans—although we think that our concotion is much tastier! Our TENZING blend delivers all of the uplifting goodies green coffee has to offer in a blend that both energizes and refreshes. Downing a can of TENZING gives you about the same naturally sourced caffeine boost as a cup of coffee—ensuring that climbing steep mountains can still be a walk in the park!

Aad Tervoort

M.Sc. physical/chemical engineering or rather: TENZING’s Alchemist