Suburban Coffee

We picked two ten-litre buckets of coffee berries this week from our suburban coffee bushes. This is the first serious pick from half a dozen four-year old bushes – a nice little yield with at least the same amount yet to come. We’ll end up with something like 10 kg of ground, roasted coffee, which would be most of a year’s supply except that we’ll give a lot of it away. But this is only the first six bushes to come into proper yield and this is only their first year – there’s another eight or ten bushes still to come on. Which is very nice because coffee is one of the crops most vulnerable to climate change and prices are likely to escalate in years to come.

We’re in a frost-free, subtropical, coastal climate here. This isn’t ideal for coffee – it likes a tropical, high altitude climate best – but it isn’t terrible. The coastal influence takes the top off the hot summer temperatures that would degrade the quality of the coffee, and the bottom off frosty winter temperatures that would damage the plant. These ones are Arabica but some of the younger ones are Yellow Bourbon variety and it will be interesting to see how the two varieties compare for both resilience and flavour.

If you have a frost-free site that is not too hot and sun-baked in summer, coffee is a perfect suburban crop. The bushes are attractive – glossy green leaves, beautiful (if short lived) white flowers, red or yellow berries. They don’t mind shade – ours are all planted as understory or down the south side of the house – and can be pruned into a very attractive hedge. If you live on the edge of bushland, you need to be onto harvesting because there is some concern about them going feral but otherwise they take little maintenance. They like rich soil, (so they are worth spending a bit of compost on), enough water, good drainage – all the usual stuff – and some seaweed brew or worm castings or weed tea occasionally for the micronutrients.

Processing coffee by hand makes you realise why it is the price it is. There’s five stages to it before you even get to the grinding and brewing – pulping to get the bean out of the cherry, fermenting to get the slimy fruit off the bean, drying, removing the husk and then the papery parchment below it, and roasting. It’s all perfectly possible to do by hand and end up with a very good cappuchino, but once you get more than a few bushes, you might think it’s worth investing in some tools.

Step One is pulping. This can be done in front of the TV or a good movie just by squeezing the beans out of the ripe berries. A couple of years ago, we invested in a pulper.

Step Two is fermenting. This just means covering the beans with water and leaving them for a day or two until the slimy mucilage washes off leaving beans that feel clean and not slippery, then rinsing thoroughly.

Step Three is drying until the beans are dry and hard enough that biting them leaves no tooth mark. It will take anything up to three weeks depending on humidity, with the beans spread out on something like repurposed old screen doors in an airy, sunny spot where you won’t forget to bring them in if it rains.

Step Four is hulling, and there’s two stages to this. First a tough but thin shell, then a thin silver papery parchment layer. We’ve done it in the past in a food processor with plastic or tape covered blades, and then a fan to winnow. The silvery layer is a pain because it is easy but very laborious to remove, and if it’s still on it burns during roasting. These days we look for a commercial roaster that will also hull the beans.

Step Five is roasting. There’s lots of ways to do this and getting a perfect roast might take a bit of practice. We used to do it in a cast iron pot over a barbeque, stirring the whole time. Best done on a windy day to avoid a caffeine headache from the fumes. We’ve also used a popcorn machine, and we have friends who swear by an air fryer. These days, we pay for commercial roasting.

And then grinding, brewing, frothing the milk, baking some ma-amoul to go with it, sitting on the verandah with a friend – one of the sweet pleasures of life.