Coffee!

Last night Novio and I started to produce our own coffee. Well, perhaps that is a bit of a misleading statement. We have not started any kind of large scale production, nor have we sown any coffee seeds, but his dad has a couple of coffee plants in the garden and has a couple of pots of beans that he´d already harvested.I love coffee and drink it endlessly. I also have a fascination with all things coffee related from cafés to coffee cups and the beans themselves and the sacks that they store them in and the haciendas where they grow them. Last year I visited a café hacienda with my sister in Colombia and it was fascinating.

The coffee process from this stage is that we have to crush the beans to get the top layer of shell off, then the second layer. Then we have to separate the clean beans from the outer shell. Then we will toast them and then we will grind them and then we will make delicious coffee.

Filled with enthusiasm we began our crushing...

...which consisted of putting the beans in a pot and using a large and heavy gardening implement. Fairly quickly are initial enthusiasm gave way to sore hands and aching arms. We only managed to crush about a third of the coffee we had. We will undertake phase 2 (the rest of the crushing) tonight.... At the current phase we have acheived what looks like a bucket of pebbles.


Novio´s dad (El Suegro) says that there is nothing better than drinking a cup of coffee that you have grown and harvested and crushed and roasted and ground yourself. I may not have done the sowing or harvesting but with my achy arms and sore hands I think that this is definitely going to be the hardest I`ve ever worked for a cup of coffee. I can´t wait for the first cup!