Making coffee from scratch

Fresh Arabica coffee berry

Depulped in their muscillage

Fermentation

Coffee beans in their parchment after a few days in the sun

Dehusking by hand. 

Green coffee after parchment removal

The finished product after roasting

I had a fun time processing two kilos of fresh coffee berries from a colleague. It was a tough job processing the berries by hand but the effort was very interesting and exciting.

To speed up the process, I used a tool for cracking crab shells and completed the task in an hour. The beans were then washed with water. This "gilling basah" wet processing is used in Indonesia as compared to the dry processing methods used in other parts of the world.

The beans were then fermented for a day and then sun dried over a week. The dried beans must now be dehusked to remove the parchment covering the bean. It was yet another tedious job doing it manually. I resorted to using a garlic mincer to crack the parchment.

The result are the green beans which are

 roasted to make the coffee beans we buy at the supermarket.

As soon as the beans were roasted and cooled, I couldn't wait to make myself a cup of coffee. I can only say that the taste of that coffee was extremely satisfying. The wife liked it and that meant more to me than anything else.

The yield from 2 kilos of coffee berries was slightly over a 100g of roasted beans. That certainly gave me a new found appreciation for the hard work put in by the coffee farmers.