As it turns out I have time for at least a short post, maybe more, we will see... If you read last week's post you'll know that I was away doing coffee fermentation experiments all week. I don't think I've really explained what happens so here's a quick overview: farmers bring bags of coffee to the station, it is weighed and then added to a tank of water, from which the staff should remove the cherries that float as they are damaged (still ok for Nescafe). Then the cherries are fed into a machine with a disk that spins, which removes most of the beans from the cherries. (I was trying to think of an analogous fruit to coffee so you can get some idea of what it's like, and I think that sloes are probably the closest, but the only have one seed). Then they are sorted again by floating, with the low quality beans being the ones that float. Next they are put in a tank to “ferment” - the beans are covered by a kind of mucus which needs to be removed, and if you leave them for several hours it starts to loosen and turn to slime, which can then be washed off. The final step of wet processing is to soak the beans in water for between half a day and a day – this might actually lower the quality though, so we're going to do some experiments to check whether it is actually necessary at all! Once processing is complete, the beans are moved to drying tables in the shade where huge numbers of women hand sort the beans to remove damaged ones and bits of pulp that got missed in the process. From there they are moved to the sun, until they reach 12% moisture. I was going to include pictures, but my camera is at home, so that will have to wait til next week.
As Jean-Marie is away I'm now the boss, which is a little strange! In the end the experiments didn't involve staying up all night as processing is a night long business so there are plenty of staff eager to help us out for a fiver. The first washing station we visited was about an hour and a half south of Kibuye, a city on the shore of Lake Kivu, in the West. It was pretty badly run as they didn't have enough water to process properly and several bits of the pulping machine didn't work as they should. The old fashioned processing method is seriously water inefficient – everything is moved through the system using water and then washed with more water, before being graded (by density) with even more water. The pulp should be being composted, but it really needs lime to neutralise the acids and that's expensive, so it's unfortunately left to rot which stinks and pollutes the rivers. I forgot to take any photos of the piles of pulp this week, but will next. Jan (the German) is going to experiment with creating his terra pretta using coffee pulp and hopefully turn it into a business that will operate at many washing stations in the future.
Had a bit of a hairy moment on Thursday when we got a puncture when the road was damp and slippery. As with most of the time, we were going round a bend and down a hill and the car had a little slide around, which got the adrenalin going! Fortunately our driver Jeff is good and he held it nicely and there was nothing coming the other way. It actually turned out well as we were 5 minutes from a city centre and even closer to a garage who repaired the tire for £2 (yes that's a 2)! Also fell off my bike yesterday – a car was coming the other way and so I couldn't see that there was a pile of stones on my side of the road until about two seconds before. I wasn't going too fast and managed to stop just before and only gently fly over the handle bars, getting a tiny cut. I had some Mutzig medicine and that made it all better though.
Mario has bought some coffee from farmers that we are processing ourselves outside the house (below). It's from an organic plantation where about a month ago Mario found frogs and birds nesting, something we haven't seen anywhere else! We're processing it differently, by drying the whole beans which moves sugar from the pulp into the bean, which will hopefully make a tasty espresso, I'll bring some back with me for tasting. We'll hopefully be visiting the old lady from before tomorrow to buy some cherries off her too.
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