Comments (0)

By pigwhisperer, July 8, 2011

Coffee harvest 2011 is in full swing. It’s winter so there’s lots of rain and everything is damp (our shoes, our sheets, our books, our clothes). Coffee beans are turning red on the trees. We’ve got our crews picking coffee, and every night our machines hull the fruits from the beans. I found this cool graphic of the insides of a coffee fruit. Here are the labeled parts:

Structure of coffee berry and beans:
1: center cut
2:bean (endosperm)
3: silver skin (testa, epidermis)
4: parchment (hull, endocarp)
5: pectin layer
6: pulp (mesocarp)
7: outer skin (pericarp, exocarp)

Comments (0)

By pigwhisperer, May 14, 2010

May means the beginning of winter here, and winter means rain. We’ve gotten some good rainfall lately and have started to plant coffee seedlings in open areas of the farm. Our coffee is Arabica typica, a variety that grows long and spindly and likes shade. It also takes five years for a seedling to mature a produce coffee cherries. We have two methods of getting coffee seedlings:
1) Planting coffee beans in our nursery
2) Taking young seedlings that naturally grow under adult trees from the ground and planting them in other areas.

Lorenzo managing the 2010 planting

We’ve planted 9,948 coffee seedlings so far and hope to plant more next week. After we plant coffee, we’ll plant more hardwood trees in open areas. We’ve got hundreds of tree seedlings in our nursery ranging from Jatobá to Brazil Nut trees. (I’ll write more about the Brazil Nut trees in a separate post; this is the first year we’ve attempted to propogate them from seed, and they are amazing little things!)

Português

Maio é início do inverno aqui, e o inverno significa chuva. Começamos a plantar mudas de café em áreas abertas da fazenda. Nosso café é arábica typica, uma variedade que cresce longa e fina e gosta de sombra. Leva cinco anos para um pé de café produzir cerejas. Temos dois métodos de obter mudas de café:
1) Plantação de café em nosso viveiro.
2) Arrancando mudas jovens que crescem naturalmente de baixo de árvores adultas.

Nós já plantamos 9.948 mudas de café e espero poder plantar mais na próxima semana. Depois que plantar café, vamos plantar mais árvores em áreas abertas. Nós temos centenas de mudas de árvores em nosso viveiro, variedades como Jatobá, Castanha do Pará, e Tamboril. (Vou escrever mais sobre Castanha de Pará em outro post. Este é o primeiro ano que tentamos propagá-los a partir de sementes, e eles são incríveis!)

Comments (0)

By pigwhisperer, March 13, 2010

One of our goals this year was to open up overgrown areas. In these cleaned areas, we’ll plant coffee seedlings this May. Our coffee plants like shade, so we keep as many trees as possible. The photo above is a picture of recently cleaned area of the farm. We’re so excited about all of the trees and planting space! If you look closely, you can spot Lorenzo in the background. This particular area is on a steep incline very far up the mountain. It was a tough hike to get there, and by the end Lorenzo and I were both looking for excuses to stop and catch our breath.

Um dos nossos objetivos este ano era a abertura de zonas de mato brabo. Nessas áreas limpas, vamos planta mudas de café em maio deste ano. Nossas mudas de café gostam de sombra, então tentamos manter todas as árvores no local. A foto acima é um retrato de uma área recentemente limpa. Estamos encantados com as árvores e o espaço! Se você olhar de perto, você pode ver nosso cão Lorenzo. Para chegar nesta área subimos uma ladeira valente. Foi uma caminhada difícil, e no final Lorenzo e eu estávamos procurando desculpas para parar e tomar fôlego.

Comments (1)

By pigwhisperer, February 24, 2010

Our coffee trees flowered in late November. It’s now February and, thanks to some great summer rains, our beans are turning into big boys (and girls).

About 6-8 weeks after a coffee flower is fertilized, cell division occurs to make a tiny coffee fruit. It’s as big as a pin head at this stage, but depending on climate, it can grow pretty rapidly. Coffee beans should ripen 30-35 weeks after flowering, turning from green to red. If this calculation is correct, that means our harvest will start at the end of June. This is much earlier than previous years, when we’ve started picking as late as August. But when I was a kid, June was always harvest time. Hopefully, we’re returning to our normal cycle.

Here’s a great little animated diagram of coffee bean development. I’ve linked to this before, but it’s so good, I can’t help but do it again.

Agora em português!
Nossos pés de café floresceram no final de novembro. Graças umas chuvas fortes esse verão, os nossos grãos de café estão ficando graúdos.

Cerca de 6-8 semanas após uma flor de café é fertilizado, ocorre uma divisão celular e nasce um fruto de café pequeno. (É tão grande como uma cabeça de alfinete.) Dependendo das chuvas, esse pequeno grão pode crescer rapidamente. Grãos de café devem amadurecer 30-35 semanas após a floração. Se este cálculo está correto, isso significa que nossa colheita começará no final de junho. Nos anos anteriores, começamos colhendo em agosto! Mas na minha infância, junho sempre foi o tempo de colheita. Pode ser que estamos retornando ao nosso ciclo normal.

Aqui está um link que mostra desenvolvimento do grão de café .

Comments (0)

By pigwhisperer, January 17, 2010

What’s in a cup of coffee?

Tasting coffee to understand its flavors and aroma is called “cupping.” At the most basic level, cupping coffee involves putting 2 tablespoons of ground coffee in a 6 oz cup, pouring hot water directly over the sample, and then tasting it. There’s no filtration in cupping. Coffee should be roasted light and several samples should be compared in one cupping session. Here’s a great step-by-step guide on how to cup coffee.

Why do roasters, buyers, and growers, cup coffee? It’s a way to evaluate the merits of one coffee over another, or one roast over another. Cupping helps define a really great coffee. Coffee cuppers are like wine tasters—some have such refined palates they can detect blueberry flavors, cherry notes, anise, molasses, baked apricot, blackberry jam, and other flavors in coffees. As a novice cupper, this kind of specificity intimidates me. I have to take a deep breath and remind myself that, yes, great coffee can be just as complex and exciting as wine, but its basic attributes aren’t hard to understand.

1) Aroma: Most of our sense of taste comes from smell. This is aroma.

2) Acidity: It’s not a bad thing. Actually, it’s pretty good. A good level of acidity in coffee is kind of like the acidity in red wine, or that charged feeling on your tongue when you eat a section of tangerine. Some coffees are called “bright,” which means they have a kick, or a bit of fruity acidity. The darker the roast, the more you lose acidity. Also, espresso is a very concentrated drink, so most roasters and coffee drinkers don’t want a lot of acidity in their shots.

3) Body: This is acidity’s friend and opposite. Usually, the more body a coffee has, the less acidity. What is body? Basically, it’s a coffee’s fat content. It’s the viscosity. What the heck does all this mean? Just how the coffee feels in your mouth. Does it have the thickness of water, or of milk, or of heavy cream?

4) Sweetness: This speaks for itself.

5) Clean cup: Does the coffee taste muddy, dusty, or dirty? Are there any negative flavors that block your perception of how the coffee should taste?

6) Aftertaste: What lingers in your mouth? Professional coffee cuppers spit out their sample after tasting it. What stays after the coffee goes away? Does it linger? Or is it short? Is it a good taste (like chocolate or smoke) or a bad one (like medicine)?

7) Flavor: This is the subjective category. What does the coffee taste like? How do you know? Everyone has different flavor references—what does sour taste like? Salt? Sweet? The more you taste throughout your life, the more you remember that taste and sour it, the more references you have to look back to. So maybe a coffee tastes like the pecan pie you ate as a child, with that molasses-like sweetness? Maybe it has kick to it, and that kick reminds you of a jolly rancher candy? Or maybe it has a weird, bad taste, like sucking on an aspirin? All these flavors are subjective and depend on references unique to the taster. After talking to a few professional cuppers, they’ve told me the best practice for training your taste buds is, simply, eating and drinking a variety of things, and filing away those flavor references in your memory. When you cup coffee, your personal library of flavor references will come in handy.

Comments (0)

By pigwhisperer, December 1, 2009

It’s been a long road for our coffee beans. Now they head into the final phase of their lives: the roasting process. Like cooking, coffee roasting is an art and a science. Here I am beside our brand new “little red roaster” from Ambex. Terry Davis, master roaster and Ambex owner, visited the farm to give us a few roasting lessons. Here’s what we learned.

The Science
Roasting is applying heat to a dry coffee bean in order to alter its chemical composition. Dry or “green” coffee beans drop into the roasting machine, which is basically a drum with heat flowing underneath it. Air also flows through the roaster. Many master coffee roasters say it’s not heat but air flow—which moves heat through the drum and around the beans—that cooks the coffee. After a few minutes in the roaster, green coffee beans become yellow. Beans begin to smell like popcorn or bread baking. The coffee is going through an endothermic reaction: beans are sucking in heat, and this heat is changing them. Early in the roasting process, you’ll hear a popping sound. This is called the “first crack.” No worries, the beans aren’t going crazy; they won’t need Xanex. They are expanding in size, losing water, and turning light brown. Pyrolysis is happening. (Pyrolysis should happen any time you cook anything.) This is a Greek word that means that elements (CO2, water, etc) are being released, good flavors are formed, and bitter compounds and toxins are destroyed. Also, sugars in the coffee beans begin to caramelize, which means the beans get sweeter.

Towards the end of a roast, beans also get darker. Another crack happens, and this time the beans become exothermic. Each bean is now releasing energy (heat) instead of sucking it up. Explosions do this. Apparently, so does coffee as it roasts. When you hear the second crack (and you can hear the loud popping noise even while the roaster is running) it means the chemical process is entering an important yet precarious stage. Beans start to release oils, but they also start to carbonize. If you’re not careful, you’ll have the perfect ingredients (oils + heat + organic matter) for a drum fire. This is why a good roaster never leaves her machine while it’s running. Does this mean that leaving beans in the drum past the second crack is bad? How long should coffee roast? This is where science ends and art begins.

The Art
How much heat should you give your beans? For how long? And how much air flow should the drum have? Like any art, roasting has no fixed rules. (Other than staying beside your roaster while it runs, of course!) Roasting relies on the senses. You have to smell the beans, look at their color, listen for the first and second cracks, and then taste each batch of coffee when it’s done. Every coffee is unique. Beans from higher altitudes are generally denser. Lower attitude beans are softer. Older beans are often drier than younger ones. Some beans have a lot of chaff, or bits of papery skin on them. All of these characteristics affect the roast. Even beans from the same farm but from different harvest years can vary in flavor. Bags from the very same harvest can also vary subtly. Every crop of beans has a roast profile (or recipe) that brings out its best flavor. It’s up to the roaster to find that optimum roast and recreate it. And a roast can’t just be good once. The profile, or recipe, must have continuity for that particular batch of coffee—you have to be able to recreate your best batches again and again. A lot of roasting depends on taking really detailed notes while you roast, and then tasting the coffee after it’s been roasted.

What does coffee tasting involve? What flavors should a good roaster look for? I’ll cover this in my next post. This post is getting long; in roaster’s terms, we’ve reached the second crack. So I’ll stop this batch while it’s still palatable.

Thanks for reading!
Frances

Comments (0)

By pigwhisperer, November 24, 2009

On Sunday the coffee trees flowered. Actually, buds have been around for a few weeks now but the flowers finally opened. It looks like snow has fallen on the farm. And the smell! The air smells like jasmine and it’s so strong that it’s (literally) intoxicating. After breathing this coffee-flower-air all night, I woke in a stupor. It was hard to move, hard to open my eyes, hard to even think about waking up. This was Land of the Lotus Eaters stuff. This was Serpent and the Rainbow zombie-making type stuff. The flowers are already losing their smell and wilting a bit. We’re hoping for rain in the next few weeks, to give the coffee trees enough energy to turn those fertilized flowers into beans.

Comments (0)

By pigwhisperer, November 10, 2009

Poor beans. They’ve been picked, washed, stripped, dried, and now they will be classified. Even after the wet classification process—where bug-eaten and unripe beans are separated from red cherries—there are still ways to make coffee better. This is the dry classification process.

In late November, after the pulped beans have dried and rested, we run them through another series of machines. It’s kind of like an amusement park for coffee beans—lots of drops, turns, and spins. Only when beans leave this ride, they are transformed. We are essentially creating a series of gates to make sure bad beans—bug-eaten, sour, unripe, malformed, broken—do not get into the final product.

The first machine uses sharp sieves to hull beans. After pulping, coffee beans are covered by a stiff husk that, after drying, has the texture of a fingernail. This husk must be removed before beans are roasted. Underneath the yellow husk is the raw coffee bean most of us are familiar with: sage-green in color, rounded on one side and flat on another, with a line through the middle.

After hulling, beans are dropped into a second machine that uses another set of sieves that sort by size. Size 10’s, also known as “peaberries,” are the smallest beans. Size 18’s are the largest. (A quick note: the peaberry is an anomaly of nature. When two bean halves fuse inside the cherry, making an oval-shaped bean, this is a peaberry. Peaberries are considered to have amazing flavor because their oval shape makes them roast better.) Why are beans sorted by size? It’s all about the roasting process, which is essentially cooking beans. Small things tend to cook faster than large things. The same is true with coffee—if small beans and large beans are roasted together, the smaller beans will burn to a crisp while the large beans might be perfectly roasted. This adversely affects the flavor of roasted coffee.

After beans are sorted by size, each lot (Size 10, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18) is run separately through our density table. Have you ever played air hockey? Well, the density table is essentially a large air hockey table, only angled to one side. Bad beans that snuck their way through all other gates will not usually get through this one. Bug-eaten, broken, sour, and malformed beans generally weigh less than good beans. Air lifts these bad beans higher, while better beans stay low. So good beans float to the special exit, while bad ones go into the reject pile.

Specialty grade coffee has no more than 5 full defects in a 300 gram sample. No primary defects (sticks, stones, husks) are allowed. Why such rigid standards? It’s all about the roast. Coffee beans must be roasted before they’re consumed, and roasting is a science all its own. Roasting will be the final and sixth part of The Life of a Coffee Bean.

Comments (0)

By pigwhisperer, October 20, 2009

After the last coffee post, many were left asking: “Where do all the naked beans go?” They go to a happy place, where it’s always dry and warm: the estufa, or drying house.

Skinned beans are sticky and wet with pulp. We put them into specially made wheelbarrows with release latches at the bottom. When we lift the latch, wet coffee beans pour out of the bottom of the wheelbarrow in long, straight lines across the drying house floor. The drying house is like a big greenhouse (or natural tanning bed, if you prefer). Beans stay in here for 2-3 days, depending on the amount of sunlight outside. In the drying house, beans are raked at least ten times a day with big-toothed wooden rakes. Raking moves the beans around so they dry evenly.

After a coffee cherry is picked, every step of the sorting-drying-classifying process affects a bean’s potential. We’re a little like parents: Nature gives us a perfect little bean, and we try our best not to mess it up. If all goes well, we bring out a bean’s amazing natural flavors. If not, we muck it up. How we dry our beans is really important. First, the drying patio must have a clean, hard floor. (If beans dry on dirt they will taste like dirt.) Second, the drying patio must be covered. Rain on drying coffee beans is like water on the Wicked Witch of the West—it destroys them. Beans can’t stay too wet, because they will ferment. Over-fermentation gives coffee a musty, overripe, even sour taste. But beans can’t dry too much, because over-drying will loosen their husks and put them at risk of breaking. Broken beans mean an uneven roast, which means poorly flavored coffee.

We separate each day’s beans into drying lots, so we can tell which need to be removed from the patio first. Beans must reach 11% humidity before they can be safely stored. How do we measure humidity? We have a moisture meter, of course! This contraption comes in a slick aluminum briefcase (it kind of looks like the nuclear football). Our nuclear football carries a few power cords, a scale, a tupperware, and the moisture meter. Every day, a test sample of beans is dropped inside the meter and it moisture level of the coffee. Once a drying lot reaches 11%, we bag up those beans and send them into a coffee silo. There, the beans will rest for two months until it’s time to hull and classify them. More classification? Yes. But that’s Part 5 of the coffee bean’s life. (These beans sure have long lives, don’t they? And they haven’t even been roasted yet.)

Comments (2)

By pigwhisperer, October 10, 2009

Once our coffee cherries ripen, they are handpicked. Each evening from around 4PM to 8 PM (depending on the amount of coffee we’ve harvested that day) the coffee we’ve picked is classified by a series of machines. The machines aren’t too complex—they mostly use water and gravity to separate good beans from bad.

The first machine is a large tank. The coffee cherries fall inside. Leaves and sticks are sorted out through a series of sieves. In the tank’s water, green and red coffee cherries sink, then move to the next stage of the classification process. Some cherries float on the water’s surface (these are called or “boias” or “floaters”). Floating cherries mean that a Coffee Borer bug ate all or half of the coffee bean. Why is this bad? It’s all about roasting—these half-eaten beans will cook quickly and often burn in a roaster, affecting the roasted coffee’s quality and flavor. So any floaters must be sorted out.

Non-floaters move to the next machine, which is called the C-D or cereja descascada. This literally means “skinned cherry.” The C-D does two very important things: 1) removes green cherries and 2) skins the red cherries. Why remove greens? We try hard not to pick green cherries, letting them ripen on the tree instead, but greens inevitably fall in with the red ones. Green cherries are basically under ripe fruits—they don’t have the sweetness or full development of flavors as the red cherries. If greens are mixed with the reds, they will taint the coffee. And why skin the red cherries? Our coffee harvest coincides with our winter rainy season. Drying coffee in a wet, humid environment is a real challenge. We have covered drying patios, but we choose to skin our cherries to help them dry without rotting or fermenting. The C-D machine uses a sieve. Cherries are pressed against the sieve with water pressure. Soft, red cherries are pushed through the sieve and skinned. Green cherries are much harder, so they do not press through and are instead funneled to an exit point.

The skinned red cherries then move the final machine, which we call the “Robo,” because it looks like a little robot. The Robo washes the skinned beans, removing about 50% of their pulp or mucilage. This also helps with the drying process and avoids fermentation.

When the machines are running, it feels very Willy-Wonkaesque. It’s almost like we’re making everlasting gobstoppers. All of this sorting and classification is an effort to make our coffee the best it can be. Here’s a great article called “What is Specialty Coffee.”

After this classification process, the skinned (or, if you prefer, naked) coffee beans are wheeled onto covered drying patios. Here, they will sunbathe until they are dry. But drying is Part 4 of a Coffee Bean’s life, and I’ll save that for next week.

Comments (0)

By pigwhisperer, September 25, 2009

When you were little and wondered about the intimate workings of the world, didn’t many of you turn to a trusted adult in your lives and ask, sheepishly, “Where do coffee beans come from?”

Of course you did. When you asked, you might have heard many stories, some true, some false. Coffee beans are not delivered by storks. They do not appear on doorsteps, swaddled in Starbucks bags. And, sadly, when a daddy coffee bean really loves a mommy bean, they do not make a baby bean. I really wish this were the case.

Here’s the real story: Coffee beans grow on trees. Actually, these trees look more like shrubs but they grow pretty tall. The coffee plant is a woody perennial evergreen belonging to the Rubiaceae family. There are two main species of coffee grown today: Arabica and Robusta. Robusta coffee plants are hardier, produce beans with higher caffeine content but, for the most part, inferior taste. Arabica plants grow at higher elevations and are more labor-intensive plants to raise, but their beans are denser and more flavorful. Our coffee trees are Arabica typica.

Three to five years after a coffee seedling is planted, it begins to produce white flowers. Our trees flower in December, which is summer time in Brazil. Arabica coffee trees are self-pollinating (hermaphrodites) whereas Robusta coffee trees plant depends on cross-pollination (plant sex; those devils!). Three to four months after a coffee flower is fertilized, the coffee fruit begins to grow. Here’s a very cool animation about the goings-on inside a coffee bean during its development.

When the coffee cherries turn red we pick them. It’s harvest time now, so we’re doing a lot of picking each day. Then, each evening from 4 PM until about 8 PM, after the coffee cherries are picked, we “process” the coffee. What does this mean? That’s the next stage of the bean’s life, and I’ll post it next week.

Thanks for reading.
xoxo
Frances