Cherries and Peaberries

January 26, 2007 - Atiu

Today was coffee tour day. Jurgen picked us up after breakfast and took us out to one of the places on the island where the coffee trees grow. His trees come from Kenya, the Antigua region of Guatemala, and somehow he managed to get a handful of Jamaica Blue Mountain seeds. His coffee is a blend of Arabica beans from all three trees. I'm not going to spend a lot of time here going into the history of coffee - I will assume you know it and if you're one of the rare few I haven't sat down with to share the location of the Great Rift Valley, well, I guess we'll have to have coffee one day and discuss it.
From the plantation we went to the processing facility. Coffee cherries are picked ripe and de-pulped with the help of something looking like a rotary cheese grater. It takes away the fruit, leaving you with a slimy coffee bean. The coffee is then fermented in water overnight. This serves two purposes - firstly it gets the cherry slime off the coffee bean, but perhaps more importantly, it allows the bad beans to float to the surface where they are picked off and chucked.
The fermented beans are left in drying trays out in the sun for at least 150 hours. When the coffee is sufficiently dry, it is taken to the machine that takes off the parchment - the thin papery covering left on the beans. Once that is done, they are roasted and packed either ground or whole bean.
At the end of the tour we stuck it out for a coffee tasting in town. It was fantastic. The coffee has floral notes characteristic of Kenya, coco texture characteristic of Guatemala Antigua, and the earthy green body of Jamaica Blue Mountain, as well as the very unique flavour of having been grown on Atiu. Kudos to Jurgen - what I promised when I said I'd bring back coffee for everyone at home was that I'd only bring back the good stuff. Jurgen grows good coffee.