The Coffee Process (Part 1...sort of)

This is only "sort of" the first part of the coffee process because it is not currently harvesting season and Mollie and I will not be able to document the cherry-picking. Of course, I could have begun also with planting.... Ok, so this is just the first post I'm making about the coffee process, not actually the first part of that process. Moving on.

The process you'll be able to see below is hand sorting beans--what Mollie and I have been doing the last two days. The beans are already in their green state, which means they have already been dried and hulled. All that is left is roasting. First, however, we have to sort them by hand. Before taking a step further, I want to emphasize that we spent an entire day and a half panning through only about 30 pounds of this stuff. Our necks hurt from basically looking at our navels hours on end. When we close our eyes, all we see are beans rolling around in an old pie tin. It's the most tedious and mesmerizing kind of work we've done so far.

When we sort, we are looking for three main things:

This is your happy and healthy typical coffee bean. Nice and smooth, having two even halves (which will pop at different temperatures during roasting! But I'll come to that in another post...).

This is an example of junk. Also known as crap. While we toss good beans into one bucket, we are also tossing this fine specimen into another. What has happened to this poor bean is the bore beetle, a plague on most of the farms around here. You can see where the beetle has had a meal. This affects about 25% of the crop. Interestingly, local studies show that the bore does not adversely affect the taste of the coffee. But, come on, who wants to see this when they open a bag of 100% Kona coffee?

NOTE: One former WWOOFer collected a pile of junk from Dragon's Lair and put it up against Starbucks coffee in several local blind taste tests. Dragon's Lair junk won hands down every time...

And then there's this gem. This is Peaberry. It's smaller and rounder than the regular bean. During development, only one half of the bean grew, and without the other half, it was able to grow all the way around the center. The result is a denser bean with more concentrated flavor, caffeine and nutrients. About 5% of every crop is Peaberry. This stuff sells for about 50% more than the regular bean.

During sorting, one of the only things that could keep our sanity was to start imagining the cliches that might arise from the process. For example, to describe a misfortune you might say, "Oh, that's like finding beetle bore in your Peaberry!"

And here's what we can roast and ship!