Growing, picking, and processing. We are a small experimental mid-elevation grower and processor. We have several thousand producing Pacas and Borbon, both members of the Arabica family. We stray a little from traditional small grower methods. We like to play around with watering and shading. We'll see what comes of it. We're hoping for stronger plants, more prolific beans, and better harvests. Once harvested, our beans undergo a dry natural process unlike anything known in Central America. We are hoping for a better quality, more consistent green bean than can be gotten from traditional small scale processing, coupled with a lot more romance that is available through huge commercial, high volume factory wet "soak 'em and strip 'em" processing. We'll see.
Coffee grown in Central America is traditionally shade grown. Typically the large shade trees are arranged in rows, front ways and sideways. The rows are known as cortinas de copalchio - curtains (copalchio is the kind of tree used). From a distance the cortinas look like a giant mountainside checkerboard. They are beautiful. The coffee plants live in the squares of the checkerboard. While we have some cortinas at Casacurry, we are playing around with using scattered olive trees for shade and protection. If it works, we'll make olive oil to accompany our coffee and meals. If it doesn't, we'll start over. Who knows? Maybe we'll learn that Central American olive oil is excellent. If it is, and we know you, we'll give you some. We'll know the answer in a few years.
As the coffee growing season begins, myriad fragrant white flowers appear on the coffee plants. The flowers look and smell like star jasmine. Soon enough, the bloom of white flowers is replaced by clusters of tiny green coffee cherries. As the season progresses, the green cherries develop to full size. As they mature, they gradually change in color from green to pink to red. Really, the cherries look much more like cranberries. When there are sufficient red cherries to pick, the harvest begins. We ask the
cortadores, the pickers, to harvest only the red beans, leaving the pink and green ones on the tree. This selective picking requires some skill, and we pay a premium for it. The
cortadores will return several times during the harvest as green turns to pink turns to red. As we pay by the day rather than by the pound,
cortadores benefit significantly from selective iterative picking.
The
cortadores strap large canastas, baskets, waist high to receive picked cherries. Branch by branch, the
cortadores use both hands to strip red cherries, letting them fall into their waiting canastas. Each highly skilled cortador moves quickly through the hills, going belly up with the canasta to the coffee tree, selectively loosening only the red, rarely the pink or green while spilling next to nothing. The demonstration of skill is impressive, particularly to those of us who do not possess it. When I pick, the entertainment value to skilled
cortadores appears to be pretty impressive as well...
Picked coffee goes from the canasta to burlap bags. For most growers, the bags are gathered at road side stations to be transported to the
beneficio for processing. Processing at the
beneficio involves immersion of the cherries in huge vats of water to bloat and soften the cherry. The wet cherries then run through a stripping machine that strips the husk from the berry, separates the two, and gathers the beans for the drying process. For drying, the wet beans are spread by the ton over huge cement drying pads in the sun. The beans are turned by hand over the next few days until uniformly dry and ready for grading and shipping.
At Café Casacurry, we use a natural dry table top process. This process allows each bean to dry inside its cherry and uses the dried cherry, then uses the husk as an individual storage chamber for the bean. The purpose is to create a process that allows the beans to dry relatively quickly inside the husk while avoiding any risk of fermentation. Any proposed natural dry process will need to result in repeatedly stable excellence at the cup. We're well on our way to excellence. Soon enough we'll find out about season-to-season stability. We are hoping to develop a dry natural process and technique that will be cheap, portable, risk adverse, and that will yield excellent green coffee. If successful, we'll have an inexpensive process that can be used by any small grower. It could be that we'll be able to provide independent growers with a viable alternative to selling crop to the local mass production
beneficio. We'll see.
