The Best I've Ever Had

As a former barista and med student, coffee and I are in a very steady relationship. I can’t live without it, I wake up every morning thinking about it and I go through withdrawal when it isn’t there. Hi my name is Mali, and I am a true coffee addict. So, when an option for a coffee tour came up during our trip to Sipi Falls there was no stopping me. It turns out our tour guide, Alex, comes from a family where they have been manually farming, harvesting, roasting and selling coffee for generations. Alex is a true coffee connoisseur and gave us a wonderful trip through the life of a coffee bean. Through the next several pictures and captions I am going to take you through what it takes to make a real cup of coffee. I promise you will never look at your Starbucks coffee the same, even when the barista purposefully spells your name wrong.

This is where the magic begins...a coffee tree field. 

Alex showing us that the coffee beans are ripe and ready to be picked. Keep in mind there are hundreds of these per tree, and thousands of trees around that will all be picked and harvested manually. 

The white, wet beans that are shucked out of their red shells. At this point the beans will be set out to dry, which can take up to 10 days during the rainy season.

After drying, the beans need to be shelled, which is done by this giant mortar and pestle. 

After we shelled the dry beans, the shells need to be separated from the actual bean. If they are roasted with the beans, Alex says they will be become very bitter. The technique to separate them is called "winnowing" and clearly is a talent that only comes after generations have mastered it before you. After trying as a group to winnow for 30 minutes,  Alex put all the shells back in the pan, winnowed for 2 minutes, and the shells were perfectly cleared.

Alex putting the beans over the fire to begin roasting...

The coal wasn't working well so he decided to roast over his grandmother's wood fire instead. This is inside her home, and she generously let us use her kitchen for the morning.

After roasting for approximately 25 minutes, the beans are finally ready!!

At this point, they can be sold as dark, dry roasted beans. However, Africans normally drink their coffee by adding scoops of ground coffee to hot water (like our instant coffee). So after the beans were roasted we did another round of mortar and pestling.

Alex then boiled us a huge pot of boiling water and poured it all into canteens for us. 

After two hours, standing in a hot kitchen and roasting beans over a fire, hiking up a mountain and manually grinding my own beans, this was the best cup of coffee I have ever had.