Saturday 7 February 2015

Coffee

 We plant arabica beans for espresso coffee. Coffee requires much work. From planting the seeds in a nursery, topping the seed bed with banana leaves, to spraying it daily to maintain soil humidity, transplanting the seedlings, called "copitas", into the development nursery, the digging up of the year old plants with large rootballs, their transport to the  field (some 2,000 holes each about the size of a gallon of milk), planting and maintenance (spraying to combat orange rust fungus, "broca"/weevils, "gusano coyojero"/bud worm, regular composting and guarding the new grains against marauding thrushes and jays); all these steps are required to get someone, somewhere a cup of coffee. Before we harvest the first coffee beans, the time, energy and expense required to get the plantation started and in order amounts to about 2.5 to 3 years.
Harvesting coffee is usually done at the end of the year. If the plants have matured equally fast, the harvest may last a month. But the first harvests are usually uneven and the plants can even put out new flowers while the old beans are still in need of harvesting. In this case, great care must be taken to avoid damaging the plants and flowers while harvesting the beans. The branches that hold the beans are called "bandolas" and can hold around 75 beans per branch.
A healthy plant can produce a kilo of coffee beans in a season. Since we have 2,000 plants, that can be 4,000 pounds of coffee.
To date, all the coffee we have harvested from newly producing plants amounts to a small 90 pounds, the beans picked from irregularly producing plants with semi-full bandolas on the same plant as naked bandolas. This is the problem of young coffee, irregular flowering and fruiting. The small harvest has taken us all of December, January and one day in February. For 90 pounds of coffee that is an extremely long harvest period. But one needs to practice harvesting so as not to damage the bandolas and the leaves. Coffee beans are well-attached to the branch, so one needs to exert a controlled amount of pressure to pick them. Too soft a grasp will deliver only the red, slimy skin of the bean while grabbing too hard can break the branch at the site of attachment.
The next step, after the picking and harvesting is the beginning of the processing of coffee. First, the skin is removed. This is done with a kind of water-driven augur that rips the skins from the beans. Alternatively, the beans can be shucked by hand. This is called "chanclando", likely from the Spanish word for slipper, "chancleta". At this stage the coffee is said to be "en belota".
The bean is forced out of the skin by squeezing it between the thumb and index finger. The bean, now wearing only its "pergamino" shell and bathed in sap or miel, is extremely slippery, so one shucks them into a tub of water where they will remain until all the beans have been shucked.
In Costa Rica, coffee is measured in basic units of "cajuelas"/pots. 3 cajuelas make up a "quintal". 7 quintales are 1 fanega. The Wiki article for fanega reads;
     "The fanega (Spanish for bushel) was an old measure of volume in Spanish-speaking countries. It was generally used in an agricultural context to measure quantities of grain. The measure varied greatly, but in Castile, it was equivalent to roughly 12 Imperial bushels or 55.5 liters. It was also a measure of surface area that was further subdivided into 100 varas, or the amount of land that could be sown with a fanega of seed."
 (Having lived all my life in cities, I find the system of accounting used in the countryside quite fascinating.)
After the coffee has been shucked, the beans are "en pergamino" and need to dry under the sun for several days. The second shucking, of the pergamino, is done by machine or by smashing the coffee beans in a wooden drumshaped "pilon" using a large wooden mace. The pergamino can be separated from the "oro verde"( literally "green gold") or true coffee bean by tossing the milled beans into the air and allowing the breeze to blow the chaff away.

 Coffee traders generally like coffee that has been stored for 8 months, preferring it's mellowed flavor to that of fresh roasted coffee's slight bitterness. But I like my coffee dark, strong and fresh roasted.*

The roasting can begin when all the coffee beans have dried. For this we use a large metal kettle pot. First we stoke a large fire, using guava wood which burns hot and long. The heat from the blaze makes it very uncomfortable to stand near while roasting so a long wooden spoon, like an oar, is used to stir the beans.
As the heat builds the beans begin to swell and the oils begin to warm out of the bean. This oil helps darken the beans. The smell of roasting coffee is quite a treat. After some time, the beans are dark and smell strongly and can be stored or ground for usage immediately.

*["Organic coffee" is a mis-nomer. With the onset of a global epidemic of orange rust fungus, coffee must be sprayed with a powerful fungicide. The use of such agents is prohibited in organic labeling rules. However, since most spraying takes place long before the coffee bean develops and since the fungicide is considered to be non-phytotoxic, the coffee beans are generally free of fungicide residues. The use of water for processing the beans and the fact that the actual coffee is inside 2 coats, the belota and the pergamino, which are removed and discarded (or processed in bio-digestors to produce methane gas for cooking), the coffee in your cup is virtually free of any taint.] Our coffee has nonesuch.

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