Today was a day of work – coffee making from bean to cup. After a walk through the village we stopped at a small subsistence farm. We planted small coffee shoots which will take about 6 years to grow before producing coffee berries. From there we went to work picking the ripe red coffee berries and spotting colorful iguanas in between. We weren’t the quickest and most of the trees only had a handful of ripe ones as it’s not quite peak coffee season but eventually we had a decent bowl full.
On the walk from the farm to the coffee shop we stopped into someone’s house where everyone was drinking a homemade maize wine through a tube. Apparently they do this most of the day, we did have a sip from a mug, tasted like sour sherry, not entirely dissimilar to the glass of wine I had in the hotel in Mbale apart from the added bonus of the gritty texture. Drew said it was passable and that she quite liked the texture which is quite amusing considering the texture of a banana could send her into a state of terror until quite recently!
The next stage is to remove the outer berry, this is done using a pulping machine, the white shelled beans are fermented for 24hrs then left to dry outside for anything from 2 to 4 weeks. Once dried the beans are pounded in a large wooden pestle and mortar to remove the hard outer shell.
After blowing away the dusty shells you are left with something which looks like a pale coloured coffee bean. We roasted these over a small fire and as the beans turned dark brown a warm roasted, smoky coffee smell wafted its way up. The final part of the process was to grind the beans in a smaller pestle and mortar and make the coffee.
The finished cup was unexpectedly smooth and gave a nice caffeine burst which helped motivate me into another hill walk in the afternoon.
Pirate Travels 