Coffee Harvest
7 October 2007
This year's Kona coffee harvest season is in full swing. We had our
first round of harvesting back at the end of August but it was very
light compared to this current round. So far this year we've harvested
over 16,000 pounds of coffee cherry and we're still not even half way
done. The local newspaper ran an article complaining that this year's
coffee harvest would be light because of less rain than normal. I
don't know where they got their information but it wasn't from us,
we've had a ton of heavy rain and our coffee trees are doing great.
There's no way we could pick all the coffee ourselves. For this most
recent round of picking we had a crew of 10 pickers for almost a week.
They're here from dawn to dusk, filling up bag after bag with ripe
coffee cherry. When I'm clever I'll leave out empty bags the night
before so the pickers can find them in the morning. If I'm not clever
then my day starts early when I have to jump out of bed and go find
some bags for the pickers.
I'll check on the pickers a few times during the day to make sure
everything is going well but they don't really need much supervision.
Most of my time is spent processing the picked coffee cherry. Some day
I hope to have a large automated pulper with fancy piping, strong pumps
and stainless steel troughs to move the coffee around. For now all we
have is a tiny little pulper and several buckets. The coffee arrives
in large burlap sacks that weigh about 120 pounds when full so the first
step is to empty the coffee out of the sacks and into buckets which can be
lifted and dumped into the top of the pulper. It's a laborious process
but our tiny little pulper is slow so I can usually keep up.
While I'm playing with the buckets someone else needs to watch the
output of the pulper and pick out the bad stuff that didn't get pulped
correctly. I can manage both jobs myself if I have to but it's much
easier with helpers. One day not only did I get help from Valerie
and the girls, we also had help from Oscar. Oscar was tired of
watching his parents pick coffee so he was more than happy to help us
for awhile. For a six year old, he was actually quite helpful.
It takes between two and three hours to pulp a full load of coffee.
Then the coffee sits in the vat to ferment overnight. In the morning I
have to empty the coffee and wash it clean, one bucket at a time. That
process takes another couple hours. Someday maybe I'll have a fancy
shaker table with built-in nozzles to wash the coffee. For now I wash
the coffee in a bucket with holes drilled in the bottom.
The good news is that processing the coffee by hand has really helped
us get to know the entire process. With an automated system the coffee
goes whipping by quickly, with our little process we see each and every
bean. More good news is that the barn has stairs now, last year I was
hauling the coffee up a ladder. Carrying buckets up stairs is much
easier than carrying buckets up a ladder.
Two years ago we had our beans spread out on flimsy wooden drying
racks. Having a nice big drying deck is great compared to that, the
beans dry better too. The drying deck still needs a little more work
but it's almost done. I'm sure it won't be too much longer before I
have my fancy pulping machine and the beans go flying by. That will be
a good thing because I'm tired of seeing each and every bean.
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