Another Milestone!

Another Milestone! was Originally Posted on August 8, 2011 by lavarock

Weeks ago I harvested the first of the new coffee trees. I immediately pulped the cherry and let the beans soak overnight to remove the mucilage. After planting the trees, I had a number of coffee trees die off and was going to use these first beans to replentish the stock.

As happens here, I got inviolved in other projects and have not gotten around to rebuilding the nursery for the new trees.The structure and shade cloth fell down and was pretty much destroyed by high winds we had.

While sitting here tonight withsome time on my hands, I decided to hand-mill the coffee parchment and roast it. To process coffee, we take the cherry and remove the pulp (the outer cherry) and throw that away. The pulper looks like a round cheese grater with little notches that nick the cherry skin. We soak the beans and let them dry. They are covered with a papery-skin much like parchment. The “parchment” as we call the beans in this state, can be stored for over a year and a half under the right conditions.

When we want to roast some coffee, we take the parchemtn and have it milled to remove the parchement and the silverskin, leaving the green coffee beans. The silverskin is a very fine coating on the beans. So toonight I took each of the parchment and picked off the covering by hand. It is very tedious to do it this way, and normally we would take hundreds of pounds of parchment to be milled by machine.

I ended up with 4.3 ounces of green by the time I was too tired to continue. I then did my best to get as much of the silverskin off, however there was still lots left. Much of it will burn off in roasting.

I used my Behmor roaster to roast the beans in the medium range and let them cool. Many of the beans were small as this was the first real crop on fairly immature and small trees, thus I had to watch closely to ensure the beans did not burn. After cooling, I ground them and put some in the personal-sized 1 cup drip unit I have. It has a screen on the bottom where the coffee ground sit and you pour a cup of hot water ovee thte grounds and the coffee drips into your cup.

With anticipation, I awaitied the coffee to drip and inspected the color. It looks a tad weak, so next time I’ll grind it a bit finer so that the water will take longer to drip and carry more coffee flavor with it.

The taste was as expected with Kona coffee, smooth with no bitterness or aftertaste. I detect a bit of acidity, but not disagreeable and that may be because I did not let the coffee rest before grinding it. I also have not performed a leaf test on the trees to determine the next fertilizer schedule. This particular section has only received rainfall this year as the irrigation system has issues in that area. Many items effect the taste of Kona coffee and all of the variables will soon settle down.

Still, a very fine, first taste of coffee from my new trees! It has been what, 8 year or so in the making and I will soon be able to offer this new version of my coffee on the ItsKona website.