Coffee Aspirations

We live on a small property with a creek at the bottom of it.  The hill that goes down to the creek, often quite steeply, is filled with coffee trees – mainly Arabicas.  We have about a hundred trees (more like bushes), which to my uninitiated eyes when we moved here seemed like a huge number.  Naively, I pictured us merrily harvesting our beans, magically roasting then grinding them, then blithely sipping our own delicious brew.

That’s not quite the way it worked out.  The first time we “harvested” we had the help of our youngish children, which everyone with youngish children knows isn’t necessarily that helpful.  When we’d go to Michigan to pick blueberries, for instance, there’d be one for the bucket, two for the mouth, one for the bucket, and so on… 
 
We got our first “crop” in successfully, after the berries had mostly turned a bright holly-berry red.  We squeeze-popped them all out of their red husks, then lugged the 5-gallon paint bucket of now-naked berries up to the roof, where we were going to soak then dry them before roasting.
 
Sadly, out of sight out of mind, and when we remembered it, the big bucket had turned into a bubbly, smelly mess.  We could probably have made a coffee liqueur out of it, but that wasn’t what we were after.
 
By the next time we had a hill full of red berries, we were smarter.  We’d talked to our local coffee maker across the bridge and realized that there was no way we were going to be in charge of all of the steps that go into coffee production.  They had some kind of machine that squeezed the outer skin off, and big vats where they soaked the gooey seeds that came out.  They let those ferment overnight to break down the goo, then in other vats they washed them, and then spread the goo-less seeds all over their big parking lot – yes, where they drove cars and trucks.  Once the seeds were dry, they had a kind of jiggling machine that shook off the dried paper coating around the seed.  And THEN they toasted them.  You see what I mean about a lot of steps?
 
So we had Armando, the man who helped us with our garden, pick two big burlap sacks-full of beans then we lugged them across the bridge.  At the end of a couple of weeks, we were the proud owners of two small 1-kilo bags of coffee.  The children insisted there was no way we could be sure that the two kilos of beans they gave us back were actually our own beans, but I refused to face that, and just really enjoyed drinking it.
 
We make café de olla, not percolated or brewed or pressed or anything else.  We scoop three heaping soupspoons of coffee into our Talavera coffee pot, add a clove, a stick of cinnamon broken into fourths, three thingies – pods? - of cardamon broken open, and pour just-boiled water up to the very top of the coffee pot.  Not very scientific, but after about 4 minutes, or until we can’t wait any longer, we pour it out through a sieve, add piloncillo or raw sugar, maybe a splash of coconut milk, then slurp it on down.  You really can’t beat it, and if I squint, I can pretend it’s our own crop!