Here's a mountain of coffee cherries waiting to be pulped:
The cherries go through this machine before being graded with water to try and remove more of the pulp, before being put in a tank to ferment.
These guys dance around in the tank once fermentation is complete to remove the mucilage from the beans. After I took this one of the guys asked me if I had any other shoes... I thought he was meaning that I should get in the tank and help, but he was actually wanting me to give him my shoes. I tried to explain that I only have one pair of shoes so I needed them!
This is the set up for our experiments. Our assistant is washing one of the samples in a sack to get rid of the mucilage after fermentation.
And to show you what's going on in each bucket:
Finally the last photo from last week is this of our washing station (more of a drying station):
So now onto this week... Had Monday off as we were working on Saturday. Stayed up until 2am in the evening washing more coffee that Mario had bought earlier in the day (powered of course by coffee). On Tuesday we were supposed to set off for a washing station near Tanzania, but for some reason the manager won't let us do the experiment at the moment. Instead we headed for a different one that would take us. It was a pretty place with a canteen (well brochettes) and a bar (warm beer unfortunately) but there was also a hospital 10 minutes away with better food and cold beer! I bought some coffee there as it is at high altitude which should make it tastier. I bought 25kg of cherries for £10, which meant the farmer got more than three times the cherry price last year, and about a third more than this year (coffee prices have rocketed). We processed it ourselves there.
First we hand sorted the cherries to remove any that where unripe (left to right it is Vital, a technician with SPREAD, Jeff our driver and then the farmer). I only bought the ripe ones, the others will end up in some crap instant coffee.
After that we put them in buckets of water and removed any cherries that floated as they have been damaged by insects (I've got a photo, but it isn't very interesting). The washing station had a hand pulper which made the next step a lot easier than it could have been (Mario got people top pulp his with stones). As avid facebook stalkers will have already seen I helped with the pulping as well.
Then we floated them again in water to remove more damaged beans. Rather than fermenting, I put the coffee straight on a drying table which should make the coffee sweeter as the bean absorbs the mucilage. They make coffee like it in Panama and it's supposed to make good espresso. It takes longer to dry though as there is a lot of slime that needs to dry. I spend a couple of hours on Thursday hand sorting it to remove more damaged beans that don't float, as well as any that got broken in the pulping process. The staff at the washing station were quite amused by me not fermenting and then me hand sorting it, as it's normally girls work. It's drying at my house as I type, here's it yesterday (it's at the back, up against the wall):
If you think it looks unheigenic, don't worry the beans are in their own little paper bags that get removed before roasting and then the roasting will destroy all life as well.
Continuing the week, the next washing station we were going to go to was shut down because it was smelling too bad - all the pulp and waste water can stink pretty bad if it isn't dealt with correctly. SPREAD helped them sort it last year, but they needed to buy some products do deal with it, and they hadn't bothered to buy them again this year until they were shut down! Should hopefully get there next week though. So we tried another washing station, but this time the manager wouldn't let us come because they and SPREAD are in disagreement about who owes who money! Finally we did find a washing station to take us on Friday, about half an hour from Butare. Got about 5 hours sleep as we had to be at the washing station for 5:30. I helped some girls sort pulp from the low grade coffee on Saturday morning as I was bored. As usual they wanted amafaranga, but I couldn't explain that I'm in debt and not being paid (now I can: fiti idemi na ntago mbona umushahara). They had to settle for me taking a photo instead:
Hopefully we'll get the last of our experiments sorted this week by the time Jean Marie returns! Oh and I should have said earlier, that ikawa y'umuzungu means the white person's coffee.
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