planting seeds.: day ninety nine

I will never drink a cup of coffee the same way again. Drinking coffee is easy (if it's good) but producing coffee is actually incredibly complex! For those of you who think brewing coffee in the morning is a small fete in itself, you aint’ seen nothing yet. Here’s a simple run-through of all the steps that it takes to make that black gold and basically what Eric and I have done here in Kona for the past few months!

First of all, coffee has to be planted and grown. Coffee farming, I can assure you, is not easy. So much time, energy, and money is dedicated to maintaining the farm, ensuring that the needs of the crop (fertile soil, sunshine, and water) are met, and protecting the trees from pests (like CBB).

Next, assuming that all goes well with growing the crop, there is the labor intensive harvesting. Here in Kona, all coffee, every single cherry, is handpicked. Crews of pickers spend days on a farm going from tree to tree, selecting the ripe cherries.

Once the cherries are picked, the seeds need to be removed from the fruit. This begins the process of turning an otherwise forgettable fruit into a beloved product and a major commodity. The cherries are run through a wet mill or ‘pulper’, which removes the skins and a layer of mucilage before fermenting in water overnight.

After fermentation, the beans are laid out on a drying deck or ‘hoshidana’ to be dried by the sun. In order to evenly dry the beans they need to be raked all day sometimes every 15 minutes depending on the weather. Once the beans dry to a specific moisture percentage it is called ‘parchment coffee’.

Parchment coffee is then bagged and goes to a dry mill. At the dry mill the beans are run through a series of machines that remove the parchment skin and silver skin from the bean. The finished product is ‘green coffee’ and is sorted into different grades of quality and size.

The really exciting part of the whole process is when the green coffee gets roasted and becomes what we all know as coffee! Of course, roasting is a craft and should not be taken lightly (no pun intended).

The roasted coffee is then packaged, ground, and finally, brewed!

There you have it. All coffee completes this long, complicated journey which I think is pretty impressive and makes the resulting product that much more special. It definitely gives you something to think about when you take your next sip!