Growing coffee

[madpierre06]

Re: Growing coffee

Some nice pictures and exciting happenings there......there are a couple of trees heavy with unripened cherries in a public park up here, Im going to keep an eye on em and hopefully harvest enough for a batch worth processing.

[Divey]

Re: Growing coffee

Tony, I have a couple of coffee trees I bought and I would like to know if you or anybody else could possibly tell me how old they may be.

[tonyt]

Re: Growing coffee

hi divey. the first picture below is a one-year-old plant in the ground. the second pic is a one-year-old in a pot. big difference. yours might be two years old. they look ready to shoot up if you planted them. coffee has a long vertical root that needs space.

my trees are still exploding in blossom - even more than yesterday, which i thought was amazing. today theyre covered in blossoms. looks like a bumper crop on the way. i seem to remember reading somewhere that big crops restrict the growth of new wood, because most of the plants energy has to go into the cherries instead of growing new wood for next year. maybe thats an issue for coffee plantations, but i really like the look of the trees at the moment. in two days the blossoms will all be dead and the pinhead cherries under way.

[tonyt]

Re: Growing coffee

Im going to keep an eye on em and hopefully harvest enough for a batch worth processing.

gday mad pierre. no point letting them go to waste is there? the council will no doubt reward you for helping them keep their park in order. or prosecute you for agricultural theft. maybe strip the trees in the dead of night is the way to go.

[madpierre06]

Re: Growing coffee

Gday Tony. I have to haver a quick check around and see if theres any signage saying I cant. Should that therefore mean that I am able to? ;D A quick recce to work out the plan of attack coming up later this week 8-)

[samyamy]

Re: Growing coffee

Foonaaah! I had no idea you could grow coffee trees in Australia! Great work on your home roasting skills mobbarley! Been reading though this forum and thought it might be a cool idea to buy one for my mother, seeing shes a coffee nut). Although the process of actually roasting is always time consuming and perhaps too much effort for what its worth (in her option). Ahh well.

Are the seedlings quite expensive to buy?

[dski]

Re: Growing coffee

Mobbarley and Thundergod, how did you separate the hull from the beans once you had removed the flesh??  :-?

I was in the Glasshouse mountainse on the weekend, on the property where we stayed they have a few coffee trees. Turned out they still had some dried beans there, so I grabbed some just for experimentation purposes.

Any tips other than individually peeling each bean? Cheers!  ;D

PS - I might try using a mincer I have. I found this:

"Since my original posting I have found that an old fashioned
hand-cranked mincer is more than satisfactory. All you do is take off
the blade and cutter at the outlet. The beans go down the spiral feed.
You hold a board against the outlet and the backup of beans in the
spiral cracks the hulls, without damaging the green beans. Then you
use a hair drier to blow the hulls off the beans."

Seems worth a try.

[Divey]

Re: Growing coffee

Foonaaah! I had no idea you could grow coffee trees in Australia! Great work on your home roasting skills mobbarley! Been reading though this forum and thought it might be a cool idea to buy one for my mother, seeing shes a coffee nut). Although the process of actually roasting is always time consuming and perhaps too much effort for what its worth (in her option). Ahh well.

Are the seedlings quite expensive to buy?

I bought the two I have from Flower Power here in Sydney and they were $34.00 each.

You can also buy them from Daleys... http://www.daleysfruit.com.au/

Their website is not the easiest to navigate, however, the coffee trees are definitely listed.

[mobbarley]

Re: Growing coffee

Mobbarley and Thundergod, how did you separate the hull from the beans once you had removed the flesh??  :-?

I was in the Glasshouse mountainse on the weekend, on the property where we stayed they have a few coffee trees. Turned out they still had some dried beans there, so I grabbed some just for experimentation purposes.

Any tips other than individually peeling each bean? Cheers!  ;D

PS - I might try using a mincer I have. I found this:

"Since my original posting I have found that an old fashioned
hand-cranked mincer is more than satisfactory. All you do is take off
the blade and cutter at the outlet. The beans go down the spiral feed.
You hold a board against the outlet and the backup of beans in the
spiral cracks the hulls, without damaging the green beans. Then you
use a hair drier to blow the hulls off the beans."

Seems worth a try.

Dry the beans first and then it just cracks off - First time round I used my hands, second time I used a food chopper with some rubber on the blades so that it whacked the beans instead of chopping them. Its been said that a food processor with plastic blades does a good job.

[mobbarley]

Re: Growing coffee

If you crack them well you can separate them with a strong fan .

[madpierre06]

Re: Growing coffee

There are a few tips for hulling and home processing and such in this thread also.

http://coffeesnobs.com.au/YaBB.pl?num=1251367805

I like the sound of the mincer with the blade and cutter removed for hulling.

[tonyt]

Re: Growing coffee

I like the sound of the mincer with the blade and cutter removed for hulling.

i wonder go this would go with pulping. im a bit reluctant to skim off the floating skins in water after pulping because a fair number still have one bean inside.
a defanged (as it were) meat grinder sounds like a possibility. pulping is without doubt the worst part of the whole process.

[Thundergod]

Re: Growing coffee

I peel each one Im afraid DSKi.

As for pulping I do the same but I just have to squeeze the cherry the right way and the seeds easily pop out.

[dski]

Re: Growing coffee

I peel each one Im afraid DSKi.

Haha, thats what I ended up doing whilst watching some tele. Only a small batch thankfully, only about 150 g once hulled.

Thanks for all the tips peoples.

Once I roasted it I found that the silver skin didnt come off during roasting as it seems to with the commercially sourced beans.

The result looks a bit average, most of them still have the skin on them, and the beans themselves are very dark despite a pretty short roast time - to do with the skin I guess.

Still, interesting experiment, and I have yet to taste them.

[Berniemtc]

Re: Growing coffee

I havent thought before how Id pulp by hand because we use machines, but I think the way Id go about it is to use my feet in the plastic kiddies pool. Youd need more than bare feet - maybe soccer boots (not straight after a game though!).
;D