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Published: April 24th 2008
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Any reader of this blog will know by now that our friend Christine owns and runs a small organic coffee farm here in Antigua. She had told us that the picking season was at hand and that she was a little concerned about getting enough help to pick the crop, and so we gamely offered our family’s labor to help out. Christine politely smiled and thanked us, and as the weeks went by we heard from her a couple of times that the picking was going a little slowly, and every time we renewed our offer to help out.
Finally, it occurred to us that our “help” might be more of a chore for her to manage than true assistance in the picking. She knows us well enough to be honest with us, so when we asked about it, she politely said, “
weeelllll….”
She also went on to say that it would be really interesting for us to get a little closer to the coffee farming process and we’d learn a lot by picking, if only for a few minutes. In fact, this would need to be a pretty short little experience since her farm manager really didn’t want
Steve and his girls
all smiling and giggling! a bunch of gringos shaking up the picking staff by stepping on their toes. Essentially, every pound we picked was one less pound that would compensate a farm worker, whose wages obviously feed their families. Humbled by our complete lack of insight into how our presence would affect the pickers around us, we accepted the invitation, and Christine would position our visit there as an “educational experience for our friends who want to understand coffee.”
I’ll say!
We were told to prepare by wearing old clothes and to try to be respectful of the workers around us; don't point too much and do ask permission to take pictures.
In typical fashion, everyone at the farm was completely generous to us. As we walked out to our picking spot, we walked by several families picking beans. We smiled and Christine explained our presence (“humor these gringos, okay?”), they smiled and laughed, and one little group of women in particular laughed and flirted with Steve, and he shamelessly flirted back. Ah, having a good-looking husband has many rewards…we were in!
We walked out to a line of coffee bushes, and Christine and her farm manager explained the process
The champion coffee picker
and her day's take - about 60 pounds of picking the proper color and texture of bean. The beans (which are actually berries; they
contain the beans) do not come off any more easily ripe than unripe, so you sort of have to wrest them off the branches while not damaging the fragile ends of the branch, which contain the buds for next season’s beans. They can be difficult to spot under the large leaves, and since we’re in the dry season, the dust on the leaves means that within 2 minutes of picking, your hands and arms (and soon, of course, your whole body) are covered in thick dust. Also, there might be ripe red beans right next to green beans, so you have to be very precise in what you grab and what you leave. We quickly discovered that, like the Eskimos having many different words for snow, a coffee picker has to discern among many different shades of red. The beans do not always turn red uniformly, so many of those you need to leave on the branch. However, some green is acceptable; it’s a matter of degree. Also, being a tall person is a huge disadvantage here; we had to bend over to pick
The workers sorting
only quality beans are allowed, as bad beans can ruin a batch during the fermentation process, which removes the muscilage. the most of the beans.
After maybe 30 minutes, the farm manager called an end to the picking for the day (every picking needs to be turned in by 4pm in order to continue the process leading to fermentation so that the beans are ready to go to the drying patio the next morning) and gathered everyone’s take. This was a time for all the pickers to bring their buckets or bags of carefully sorted beans to be weighed, and everyone was in a pretty festive mood. Their hard day of work was over. Steve kept smiling and joking to his group of ladies, and they giggled and joked back. One elderly lady showed us her pickings of the day - it weighed about 60 pounds! She was
amazing. The five of us gather our big contribution of the day - 7 pounds for the Trautman family plus Christine! Whoo-hoo! We’d better not quit our day jobs…
We then headed off to Christine’s office to “cup” yesterday’s crop. That’s when Christine takes samples of the various lots that have been drying on her patio and roasts them herself with her little personal automatic roaster. This is about the
size of a regular coffee maker, but spins the green coffee beans in a glass cylinder with hot air until the first CRACK which sounds just like a whip and indicates the roasting is complete. She then led us through the pouring of hot water, the smelling, the sipping off a spoon, the waiting 2 minutes til the next sip off the same cup, and finally spitting. She had all sorts of adjectives to describe the coffee and it was clear this is a matter of lots of experience. (To me, it was really awful, which is why I drink coffee with generous amounts of milk and sugar). If a crop is bad, she has to figure out what the defect is and correct it. It could be a matter of the fermentation, the humidity of the drying, or any number of other things.
For her efforts, Christine will get about $2 per pound of green coffee. This is coffee that’s been peeled, sorted, fermented, washed, dried, and now ready for shipment - this is the state of bean just before roasting. This year’s crop - abound 15,000 pounds - will be sent up to Whole Foods, who will
Christine cupping
checking for the proper aroma then roast it on a iust-in-time basis so that their customers will get the freshest coffee possible. (Green coffee has a very long shelf life. Roasted coffee does not).
Steve and I agreed that we will never view a cup of coffee the same again. (You get about 25 pounds of coffee beans from 100 pounds of coffee berries). It’s an amazingly complex process that requires SO MUCH effort to get to your coffee cup!
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