An unfortunate journey to a cup of coffee.
Some years ago, Don Juan Carlos, an old friend of my family who occasionally help us fixing things around the house, brought us a coffee plant as a gift. We gratefully planted it in the garden but sadly, some months after we receive it, the plant was stolen.
My mother, worried that Don Juan Carlos would realize that we have lost the plant, bought a new one and planted it in the same place where the previous one used to be. With the time the plant grew up and eventually it bore fruits: many cherries sprouted from its branches.
At January of 2021, after almost one year of lockdowns, social distancing and strict mobility restrictions due to the pandemic, I decided to try to make my own cup of coffee from our dear plant, harnessing all the free time that I was having. I went over a couple of videos about the process of the coffee from the seed to the cup, and I began to follow each step to make my own coffee in earnest. It was going to be a long process, but anyways, there was not too much to do by that time.
The first step, of course, was to harvest the cherries. In the big industry of coffee there are specialized machines and enormous picker groups that do this job. However, to improve the quailty of my grains, and since I have neither such machines nor many plants, I carefully stripped out by hand the red cherries (those who are already ripe) from my plant and left the others for a possible future harvest.
After I have collected all the ripe cherries from my plant, I procced to remove the pulp from all the cherries. Once the pulp was removed, the bean (which is left with a parchment skin) is ready for the dried process, the longest step of all the operation.
There are several methods to dry the coffee beans. One of the most common and easiest ways to do it consists simply in spreading them out on huge surfaces and let the sun do his job. I chose the size of the huge surface accordingly with the size of my harvest and began the dried process. The process usually takes about 7–10 days depending on weather conditions. The beans must be raked and turned throughout the day and covered at night or during rain to prevent them to get wet. The objective of this process is to force the moisture content of the beans drops to 11%.
Since I hadn’t any device to gauge the moisture content of my beans, I let them dry for about 8 days. I was very rigorous during this process and I never let them get wet. After the dried process, the beans are warehoused until they are ready for export. So I tuck them away and waited about 7 days to continue the process. With the beans properly dried (that was what I though) the raw material was ready for the roasting process. Once more time, I pored over Youtube videos about the subject and prepare everything to keep on trucking.
Opportunely, there is an easy way to roast the beans at home. You can put them over a pan and then light the fire! The beans will gradually change their color from yellow/green to light brown and in a couple of minutes they will be ready to be ground.
I was not sure about the time I should leave the beans roasting, so I waited until they slightly became brown and then I put them out.
After roasting the beans, the whole process was almost finished. It just remained the hardest step: to ground the coffee. It sounds easy, but it becomes really challenging when you do not have anything to grind the beans at home. I tried several strategies to accomplish my objective. First, I tried to use a tool that is used by my mother to smash “patacón” (I don’t know its name in English).
Although this tool allowed me to grind some roasted beans, it was extremely inefficient. It was hard to grind them and the remaining grind got stuck to my tool, so I was wasting a considerable amount of my future drink. Moreover, the grind was too coarse to be used to prepare a cup of coffee. I had to change my strategy.
To offset the loss of coffee, my mother came up with a really good idea. If we put the coffee beans inside a plastic bag, then when we tried to grind them, we will not lose any grind; it will remain inside the bag. So, I took a millenary and extremely useful artefact which is present in any house in Colombia and I turned to this new plan.
The new plan seemed to be infallible in my mind, but when I tried to smash the beans inside the bag with the rock, the beans were so hard that the bag tore. Finally, I gave up on my contingency and I used a food processor to grind the roasted beans.
The result was way better than before. I managed to get a much finer grind this time (however it was too thick yet). I did everything I could to refine this grind and all the process was finally accomplished.
The final step, was to use the grind to prepare the cup of coffee. I
anxiously poured the grind into a pot with boiling water and waited until the beverage was ready.
This was the result of all the failed experiment. For some unexpected reason the grind was not suitable enough to prepare a cup of coffee. The taste was awful and the intensity very low. All my adventure was a total failure.
Although I couldn’t get a decent cup of coffee, I did realize how hard and underrated this process could be. All of this experience turned to be an invitation to value the work of thousands of colombian farmers who work every day (in terrible conditions) to supply the country and the world with the highest quality coffee on the planet.
