Moving to Roanoke, VA

We got back from Hawaii mid-June and spent a month visiting out parents and enjoying life before starting real life again. Unfortunately we did not make it to Dollywood, but I did take Dave to the Knoxville Zoo, where I hadn't been in about 10 years.

Then we moved to Roanoke, VA in July, 2014.

Now, the most important thing about Roanoke is that this is the view from my classroom window:

The view is both good and bad. I have class in this one room from 8-5 and usually eat lunch in here too, so we need something to look at. At the same time, it's torture to see mountains all around us all the time and not be able to GO HIKE THEM.

Dave started school too, but as a teacher! Here he is, off to interview at Faith Christian School where he now works, molding young minds. Dave teaches seventh grade Foundations of Western Civ, seventh grade Ancient Literature, and twelfth grade U.S. History. Not exactly having gotten a masters degree in these subjects, he's usually learning his own lessons somewhere between two weeks and twenty minutes before his students do. He would say this shows how flexible a Duke M.Div. can be.

Below is the classroom where the magic happens, and also where he says such things as, "Ok, quizzes are out--I don't understand why there needs to be talking," and, "Don't make me regret treating you like adults," as well as [grouchy teacher face]. All things considered, the first year of teaching is the hardest thing Dave says he's ever done, but he loves it!

He's also the part-time librarian for his school, and I go there to do homework pretty often on nights and weekends (since the JCHS library is never open).  He was able to make sure my practice eyeball remained intact long enough to terrify the first graders.

To Kailua (and beyond)

(I think this post just sat around as a draft for a long time accidentally... so here it is now!)

Traveling 20 miles north from Honaunau to Kailua-Kona is crazy. You leave the jungle and enter a desert, trade Coqui frogs for noisy pigeons, and apparently give up healthy bananas for infected ones...

Just for comparison

                Honaunau                                                                  Kailua-Kona

But we also saw this, so the trade from jungle to urban desert wasn't all bad:

We are staying right on Ali'i Drive, which is the main tourist drag. Mostly there are the same black, rocky beaches as Honaunau, but some have a bit of a twist. Here, you can see someone used lava rocks to build up a hot tub...










...an idea that would be romantic and alluring, if not for the graffiti, 12 scary looking smokers awkwardly staring at us from behind, and the warning that a giant octopus will likely reach out of the ocean and tip you over.















We miss a lot about being on the jungl-y side of the island, but here is one thing we don't miss:

And even though we didn't have all the ducks and chickens, cats and dogs, chameleons and garden spiders, I was very glad to see that the geckos here are almost as abundant!

We were very excited to get to some other beaches and snorkeling sites, so we drove an hour farther north to Mauna Kea Beach. White sand, turquoise water, and coral reef! It was the first (and only) real "beach" we visited.

And that's it! Then we flew home and moved all our stuff from Durham, NC to Roanoke, VA.

Kona Coffee, the Final Cut: from Cherry to Roasted Delicious

If our previous posts about the preparation of coffee have seemed a bit piecemeal or out of order, hopefully this master-post will help put things in perspective. During our last few days on the farm, we got to walk through the whole process--minus picking of course.

First things first: here is the center of the processing operation. The top level is the drying deck, where freshly washed coffee beans are spread out to dry. Moisture levels have to be checked regularly in order to catch the beans at the proper...dryness. Beneath the drying deck is where Mollie and I spent most of our time handling coffee. I'm not very tall (5' 10" if I'm trying to impress someone), but I had to hunch a bit while working in some areas of this space. It houses the pulping station, milling machine, sorting table, and roaster--with which you will soon become very familiar.

Cherry is the stuff picked right off the trees, ripe when it turns this bold red. As you can see from the conversion chart, 100 lbs of cherry only yields 12.8 lbs of roasted coffee! Processing involves shedding multiple layers: the outer skin comes off in pulping, a papery layer ("parchment") in milling, the rest in roasting.

Here is the pulping station. As you'll see below, we dump the cherry into the hopper, the red skin is stripped off and a slimey whiteish bean is dropped into the large basin underneath. These beans will sit in water overnight to ferment: a chemical reaction takes place that will actually make them hot enough to melt away the slimey membrane! After they are washed the next day, they are laid out on the drying deck--on the level above this room, if you remember from the first image in this post.

Once the beans are dry, they appear in their "parchment" form and are sent to the milling machine. Passing through a screw mechanism, the parchment is ground off and the green bean is revealed. Every bean passes through this machine no fewer than two times.

Here is Mollie working at the sorting table. Before green beans can be roasted, we have to pan out the junk fragments and the peaberry. You'll see above three sorting screens: the first is small enough to let only broken beans through, and the second and third draw out the peaberry. If you remember from an earlier post, peaberry is the smaller, rounder bean with more concentrated flavor that sells for a good bit more than regular beans.

After sorting, we are finally ready to roast. The roaster is basically a glorified blow dryer that keeps the beans moving in a vertical fountain over the heater. While roasting, we have to constantly control the fountain by reducing the blower speed to adapt to the rapidly decreasing weight of the beans.

In the videos below, we are working on a medium-dark roast, which was by far the most exhiliarating roasting experience. Imagine your standard coffee bean: it is divided into two halves. During roasting, each half pops(!) at a different temperature.

For a medium roast, we get through the first crack and then continue roasting until we reach a predetermined temperature and then dump the coffee into the cooler.

But for a medium-dark roast we wait until the second pop just begins and then dump. Timing is everything, ensuring the beans continue and finish their second pop once in the cooler.

Good-bye to the Farm!

Friday was our final day on the farm before heading to a B&B for our last few days in Hawaii. We finally got to work the big weed-whackers, which are extremely messy and fun. I wish we had before and after pictures of the giant elephant grass that was taller than we are that we cut down to nothing!

  This is me halfway through the morning...                          and Dave pre-weed-whacking

     Threw these clothes away yesterday                     These puppies followed us all over the farm!

After our last day on the farm, we finished the evening down at Pu'uhonua o Honaunau (Place of Refuge). I wrote about it in a previous post and had pictures of the beach, but we hadn't gone to see the ancient structures. This is the place where people who broke sacred laws could go to be absolved (if they could make it there before being caught and put to death).

The lele (tower) where the offerings were                   Ki'i (wooden images) stand watch over the

placed                                                                      mausoleum that holds the bones of 23 chiefs

Here we are with Bob and Beryl, our coffee-farming hosts. Every Friday night they gather with friends at the Place of Refuge for a potluck. They're in their 70s and bought the farm 10 years ago!

d

They have 2 studios attached to their house, one downstairs that their daughter was staying in, and this second one around back. It may not look like much, but there were NO BUGS at all! That's more than I can say about the luxurious in-town condo we're staying in for our last couple of days...ehem..way too many ants.

The separate twin beds, reminiscent of the 1950s, were awesome for about a week. It was also fun learning to live minimalistically in the studio. We both realized that packing five shirts was still too many for three weeks.

And a few more pictures for the heck of it...

And of course, another beautiful sunset at the Place of Refuge!

Dave has one more coffee post that he will be putting up soon. We got to work with ripe coffee cherry, fresh off the trees, so we have finally seen the whole process. After that, more vacation-y things. I'm most excited about going up 14,000 ft to Mauna Kea!

Painted Church and House Blessing

This is St. Benedict Parish, an old Catholic church, aka the Painted Church. It is maybe 3 miles from our farm, located in Honaunau. In 1899 after the church was built, Father John Velghe painted the church with regular house paint on regular wood, with no formal training in painting. The domes painted behind and around the altar are my favorite part!  It still has a congregation and is involved in providing medical services to the local community.

The ceiling has rusty metal starts nailed all over it, my second favorite feature. Dave's favorite element is "the mix of classic European basilica-type imagery (see the altar above) with the indigenous palm trees (on the ceiling below). The images with more creation-centered themes are similar to the way the ancient Jewish temple was adorned, reminiscent of the Garden of Eden."

Most of his congregation couldn't read so he depicted biblical stories in murals on the walls. The murals include depictions of St. Francis receiving the Stigmata, Jesus rejecting the Devil, Cain killing Abel (with Eve trying to revive Abel!), and of course, no church building would be complete without showing the boiling torment of Hell.

We also went to a "traditional Hawaiian" house blessing--which was actually a 3-hour house warming party with 15 minutes of local culture. The multi-million dollar house was located in a gated community, complete with kidney-shaped lawn and terrace. It was catered, people brought orchids and other plants as presents, and everyone was white except the Kahu (spiritual guardian), his wife, and the performers. For the blessing, we all went outside in the rain and the Kahu tied two vines across the railing blocking the door. Then as the ceremony started, the new owners untied them and the Kahu said it was like cutting an umbilical cord as the home was born. You can see the vines on the railing in the picture. He and his wife started chanting in Hawaiian to ask "permission" of the spirits of the land for the new owners to move in. The owners followed him around each room of the house and then outside to the four corners of the grounds while chanting and sprinkling water.

At the close of the ceremony, he started speaking English again, and prayed to Jesus that the spirits, good or bad, would give permission for the family to live there in peace. Afterwards, they sang a song about the rich ruler who asked Jesus what he had to do in order to receive eternal life. The part of the story that was not quoted was Jesus' response: "Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me" (Luke 18:22; see vv. 18-30). Then we ate good food, listened to this locally famous musician, and watched some hula dancing.

Dragon's Lair Coffee and the Process of Roasting

It is a well known fact on the island that more "Kona" coffee is sold than is grown. Dragon's Lair produces and roasts really good and honest coffee, and it is priced $5-10 cheaper than big distributors and what you can find online.

We roast to order so it is super fresh, and it means we get to roast and package instead of weed-whacking or sawing up trees! So, if you want to try some of our coffee, please do! We are here for another 10 days.

Order Dragon's Lair 100% Kona Coffee

Roasting is really fun! First, we heat up the tall, skinny roaster to about 300 degrees and turn the blower on. We pour around 9 lbs of green coffee in, and the blower keeps it moving and looking like a fountain of coffee. As the coffee heats up, it becomes lighter so we have to keep lowering the blower so it doesn't push the coffee over the sides.

The coffee turns from green to peanut-colored, then starts getting dark. At about 390 degrees, half of each coffee bean starts to pop and sounds just like popcorn! The popping continues for a few minutes and the roaster gets fuller as the beans expand. Then there is silence and the beans continue to heat up. If we are doing a medium roast, we wait for the temperature to reach about 440 degrees and dump the coffee out. But if we are doing a medium-dark roast, we wait until the second round of popping starts at around 450-455 degrees (only one side of the bean pops in the first round, and the other side starts popping in the second round). Once the second round of popping has just begun, we dump the medium-dark roast into the cooler and the popping continues for a few more minutes outside of the roaster.

Dumping the coffee out is a very high-stress process, believe it or not. Once we decide the coffee is done, we have about 3 seconds to save 9 pounds of $27/lbs. coffee from being ruined. All at once, we turn the heater off, turn the blower down, tilt the roaster so all the coffee falls into the cooling box, turn the blower back up, raise the roaster back up, and stir the coffee beans. Then, deep breath! 

Beaches

We've only been to 2 spots so far, but they are so different compared to east coast beaches! More diversity to come as we travel to other beaches next week.

These first 5 images are from Pu'uhonua, or "Place of Refuge," which is a national historic park less than 5 miles from our farm. If an ancient Hawaiian broke kapu, or sacred law, they could be put to death. If they reached this safe zone, however, a ritual would be performed where they were absolved of their crime and could return to society. Its a real life game of tag with a base where you can't be touched.

Side note: Look at the horizon in the picture below. It's hazy because of the sulfur dioxide from the active volcano Kilauea. They call it "vog"- volcanic smog.

 These sea urchins are absolutely everywhere. These small ones are in the tidal pools, and in the deep water they are a hundred times bigger and spikier.

The next two photos are from the beach right next to the Place of Refuge. It's called 2-Step Beach because the lava actually forms steps into the water (2 steps, if you can believe it), making an easy entrance for snorkelers and divers.

We saw this guy washed into a tidal pool before even entering the water to snorkel!

Finally, another beautiful sunset from the lanai (porch) at our farm.