The most important thing to remember when choosing a roast of coffee is your taste.

Grow your own

It sounds almost too good to be true – fresh home grown coffee from your own coffee beans.

It’s easy when you know how!

Coffee shrubs have beautiful dense, dark green, shiny foliage with fragrant, white flowers. The cherry-sized berries that form on bushes are ready to be picked when they become a reddish purple colour. Coffee will grow to about 3m high should be planted about 2m apart. Plants will produce a few beans after two or three years. After six or seven years the yield will have increased until each shrub averages about 700g of processed coffee.

For best results

Coffee will not tolerate frost and should be protected from cold winds during winter. Ideally, a lightly shaded position with direct sunlight for half a day, preferably in the morning is suitable, making them ideal for planting under the shade canopy of taller trees. Given adequate water, coffee will grow successfully in a variety of soil types where excess water drains freely away.

Be prepared

Coffee loves what we refer to as a well-composted soil – preferably one that retains enough moisture for shallow and deeper roots, but one that drains away excess water freely. The addition of composts, pre-wetted peat moss, blood and bone, cow manure, leaf mulch and other organic matter would work to achieve this.

Coffee

Maintenance

Coffee bushes need plenty of water, particularly from spring through to autumn, and prefer a moist, humid atmosphere. During growth, modest applications of a complete fertiliser during the warmer months will improve both growth and yields.

Picking

Mature trees bloom for a few days with an intense jasmine fragrance. About 6 months later, red berries will be ripe to pick when they have matured to become reddish purple colour about the size of a cherry. It is not unusual for coffee trees to bear year round with flowers, ripening berries and ripe berries on the bush at the same time. It is for this reason that conscientious coffee growers prefer to handpick ripe berries over and over again from the same tree.

Processing

Once the berry is picked, it still must be processed. The two methods of processing coffee are described as natural and washed.

Leaving the berries intact to sun dry produces natural coffee. Berries are left to dry in the sun where they are raked several times a day and covered to keep out moisture at night. After several weeks the berries are dry and ready for husking to expose the clean coffee bean used for roasting. This natural method is the older of the two methods and produces a full-flavoured or richbodied coffee quite different in character to ‘washed’ coffee.

The washed coffee process involves placing mature coffee berries in water after picking. Rubbing and stirring the berries is needed to remove outer pulp, leaving an inner gluey substance around the bean. This remaining pulp is then washed or fermented away, until the beans are clean. The beans are then spread in the sun to dry before roasting.

It takes approx. 500-600g of fresh berries to make 100g of clean dried beans.

Correctly gauging roasting is an art. Overdone means the taste is bitter and acrid. Underdone means the flavour and body is not developed.