bugs and bananas

What do you take in your coffee?  More than you might think!  Earlier in this blog I showed you how coffee is harvested.  For those interested, I thought you'd like to see the rest of the process. 

For a quick recap, the ripe coffee beans (or "cherries") are first hand picked.  Coffee is a fairly new crop to Papua New Guinea and if you look back at pictures even 50 years ago all you'll see is grassy hills.  But since coffee grows best in the shade, whoever introduced coffee to this area also introduced large Malomalo trees ("malomalo" means "soft") to provide cover for their coffee crops.  Now the hills are covered with forests of these trees hiding coffee gardens everywhere you go. 

 Each coffee "cherry" contains two beans.

 

 Ripe cherries are fed through these shelling machines.  Shelled beans (see below) fall into the bag, while the shells are spit out the other side.  During coffee season our valley is filled with the stench of rotting coffee shells.  It may not look too sanitary but to give you some perspective, it used to be done by chewing the skins the off.

 Shelled beans are then laid in the sun on tarps to dry. 

At the coffee factory we often visit I was surprised to find that a parking lot covered with beans isn't meant to stop anyone...

Just drive right on in!

 ...or walk in.

...or take time for a photo op.

...or make a "coffee angel" or two.

Worried about what you're drinking?  Don't be.  There's still another shell that's removed from the beans before they're roasted.

  

Shelled beans are put through two more machines that seperate them into grades.

Each grade is then roasted in this huge machine.  The dried beans are stuck in the vat on the left and a man stands watch (the guy in white) to make sure the beans are taken out at the exact moment.  I think last time I was in I heard that 16 minutes is light roast, 17 minutes is medium and 18 is dark.  Not much room for error.  When the coffee is ready it's dumped into the bin where it's quickly turned while air blows up from below to cool it off. 

It's then ground...

Poured into bags...

Double checked for the exact weight...

 

Then sealed up to be sold. 

Want flavored coffee?  Add a splash of your flavor of choice.  Literally, they just dump 1/2 a cup or so of flavoring into a barrel (on a spinner) of coffee that someone spins to coat the beans.   Pretty high tech.

There it is...fresh coffee from the Highlands of Papua New Guinea.  If you're tired of paying $20 a pound for it back home...come visit me here and you can buy a bag for $3.50.   It might just make it worth the $2500 trip.