Backyard Coffee

By Anonymous -
I promised to show you how we got from coffee "fruit" on the tree in our backyard to the aromatic, yumminess of the stuff I drink every morning. Finally...the coffee post you've been waiting for!

Eli got in on the picking action
Our friend, Enoch (you've seen a bit about him on Facebook), picked the red coffee fruits for me. He showed me how to squeeze the beans out of the red skin. It's a very sticky job.
  After removing the skins, we placed the fruit in a bucket to "sleep" for a couple of days. I guess this loosens the flesh of the fruit from the bean so that it is easier to wash off. Then, Enoch washed and rinsed, washed and rinsed, washed and rinsed the coffee beans to remove the fruit from the seed.
After the outer, red skin is squeezed off

Wash, Rinse, Repeat











We were left with green coffee beans that still have the seed coat on them. Enoch and I worked daily to lay them out on an old piece of window screen to dry in the sun. You want to get them dried pretty quickly or they will rot. We had to be vigilant to bring them in whenever it rained, because Enoch said it wouldn't be good for them to get wet and we'd be going backwards!
Coffee beans drying in the sun




The next step in our coffee-processing venture was a little more difficult to navigate. We needed to remove all of the seed coats from about 15 kilograms of coffee beans. Enoch told me that people usually use a machine to take off those skins, but he doesn't have one in his village. He told me that he was willing to grind handfuls of them between his palms to remove the seed coats, but I didn't want him to go to so much trouble.


The "green beans"

We left the coffee project aside for awhile because Joel and I were busy with our house remodel. Finally, after a couple of months of no coffee action happening and a lot of asking around, Enoch was willing to take my raw beans to a nearby coffee roaster. He negotiated for them to shell the beans AND roast them for me and all for a REALLY GREAT PRICE!!

Thanks to Enoch's help, expertise, and excellent negotiating tactics, I ended up with 4.5 kilograms of delicious, backyard PNG coffee for about 75 Kina ($25 USD). Enoch told me it should be enough coffee to last me for a year. I beg to differ.

I see the tree is blooming again now. Good thing.

The Finished Product
Ok...the real finished product

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