It’s been a good coffee year this year. We probably, possibly, have a whole year’s supply if the grown up kids don’t claim too much of it. When I look back, our coffee growing and processing has come a long way in the last few years, since Growing Our Own Coffee parts 1 and 2. We now have about a dozen mature bushes and another dozen coming on, and that will hopefully be enough to let the grown up kids take as much as they like. We bought a coffee pulper recently, which makes it really easy to separate the berries from the beans, and we now send our main coffee crop off to be professionally roasted. It saves a lot of laborious work removing the paper shell since professional roasters have a fan that does that as they roast, and it saves a lot of caffeine spins from breathing too much of the volatiles.
And, we bought second hand a Little Guy coffee maker that goes on an induction burner. It was ridiculously expensive even second hand but it makes real barista quality coffee.
Homegrown, homemade café quality coffee every morning. This simple life is so hard 🙂
So this “grown up children taking coffee” you speak of…
Oh how wonderful to be able to grow your own coffee. I loooove my coffee and have an old solid cast iron hand grinder, so I am able to grind my beans as I need them each morning, that is the secret to outstanding coffee grind as you use them. I am lucky to have a cafe 2 blocks walk away that roast their own beans so I get fresh beans every week.
I love your beautiful big jars, I have 2…..one for my baking flour and one for muesli but I can’t find the replacement sealing rings for them so one is now empty…..anybideas on where they could be sourced ?
Margaret, I find ozfarmer.com has a pretty good selection of canning and fermenting jars and accessories – perhaps they might have something suitable?
Thank you , I will have a look on the site.
I’m so glad to have found your site, it’s been a while now. I always wanted to know the process of growing and harvesting coffee/coffea, but never have been able to get an idea of the real thing until now. I just found the industrial explanations what would not be helpful to me at all. Today I found the courage to tell you from my coffea experience and ask you a question:
You were telling the processing so nice from A to Zed. Living in southern Germany (in town) I would not say I’d live in a coffea friendly climate though coffee is liked very much here. Nor would I call my living room a tropical or even a subtropical place. Now I have two coffee plants in there since about 20 years. They came in as little plants at 10 cm of height and are now at about 1,3 m (had to prune them). Two years ago I got – or better say they got their first flush. I nearly oversaw it but then I could follow the growing of the beans from green to red. I was so excited. They really took a very long time (several months) to get red. We call them Coffea Cherries here. I thought they would fall off by themselves when ready so I left them on their branches because I did not know when at best to harvest. So they turned from red to brown and dried out completely. When I put them off a year after (a tiny handful) they were as hard as stone, I nearly couldn’t get off the peel. The result: a bit disappointing and not usable (only one bean came out in a bright green, maybe the youngest one).
Now there are again some red cherries on the branches and again I do not know when at best to put them off. Could you please tell me the signs of ripeness? Do I have to squeeze the berries? Or try to bite into them? Or what’s the point of magic? As I do not live in the southern hemisphere like you I cannot lean on your August to October scheme but I guess it might be springtime down under, isn’t it? And April is the beginning of springtime here… So they’d be right in time, shouldn’t they?
Sorry for leaving that long comment. Thought I have to tell the whole story. 🙂 – I would be very appreciated to get some good information from you…
P.S.: Oh, and I so admired and enjoyed your soap making posts – I envy that because I never did dare getting my hands on that. I guess the glasses you all are wearing are strongly recommended, aren’t they?
Hi Irmi, so glad your coffee bushes are bearing. They are quite decorative plants so I can imagine them as houseplants. The berries are ripe when they are bright red. You can squeeze them and pop the beans out. You can eat the berries too – they are quite sweet. Or dry them after you have popped out the seed to make a tea (called cascara) which has some caffeine in it but not as much as the beans.
There is a picture of ripe beans at https://witcheskitchen.com.au/homegrown-coffee/. I used to think our coffee was a Robusta variety but I’m not so sure now. The original seeds came from a bush in a university garden, so possibly they are some kind of hybrid.
Oh, so nice – thank you very much for your so quick response. I did not know that the berries are edible, thought they might be poisonous… And making tea out of them! Cascara. Never heard of that. Thanks for your hints – I’ll be trying that. And yes, I’ve read and watched all of your coffee (and soap and other) postings, loved them very much. As for the variety: With my research on the web I found out that the beans with a soft snake-like line should be Arabica and those with a straight line would be the Robusta. And for recognition: the Arabica beans are much bigger in size than the Robusta ones. I think from watching your glass full of coffea beans that it contains the Arabica bean. If possible I’d send you a photograph picked from Internet with that two beans – but the main thing is that they suit you and you like the result, isn’t it?
Have a lovely day, Linda! See you… 🙂