Hey everyone,
Guess what! Finally after a couple of years Im currently drinking down my first cup of fully home grown coffee. How exciting!
Firstly, it tastes way better than I thought it would.. I was actually so disappointed with my crop, processing and roast that I didnt even bother taking any pictures, which now I think is an absolute shame - since its my first crop and all.. Damn it why didnt I just take some!! fwar!!
The taste is a bit rough, its definitely no heuheutenango but hey the sense of achievement is great.. its slightly toffee-cocoa-caramel like, with a rough hard-to-describe flavour thats probably come from basically being a fairly poor crop and dodgy processing. It doesnt have much on the sweet palette and has a bit of a sharp dry finish. Its still quite nice though.
Im really pleased with myself hey :
haha.
Its so much fun. Picking the cherries was fun, even for the kids, my daughter helped me deseed some of them, and they both help me sort the bad from the good (floaters and sinkers); the drying was a real pain and I couldnt get them dry enough.. I left them sitting around in the sun for as long as I could, but got lazy and ended up brining them inside after a couple of weeks, to sit next to the window sill.
After a couple of months they still looked a bit too moist, too dark in colour and the edges were ever so slightly transluscent.. so after some reading online I decided to dry them in the oven at 40 degrees C.. I think I did that for about 4 hours.. It seemed to help, so again I left them on the window sill for a fair few weeks..
All up I only had about 160gms, my bigger tree actually lost almost all of the cherries for some reason, not sure, they just all rotted or split - I think we had too much rain actually, and our soil is heavy clay!
Because I pan roast, the 160gms was (I thought) not quite enough to do a roast in the pan.. so I decided to just roast them in the convection oven (that was a first as well!!!).. It went supprisingly well with the temperature controls helping quite a bit (compared to roasting in the pan with no idea of temp!).
Even though the roast went okay, they smelt so strange! I left them for a week wondering whether or not I should drink them etc.. in the end, I ground them up and thats when I really went "woah this has actually worked!".. they had a very pungent aroma, still with that hint of weirdness.. sort of like the Peru Segunda Naturals - remember them? They were left to dry on the trees before being picked, and they had a strange undescribable smell and flavour.
So here I am, the cups empty and .. yeah Im very pleased with the result. I know some other CSrs have trees too so I give yas the thumbs up, maybe they can post their descriptions on this thread too?
The cycle is just about to start again too, yesterday my bigger trees first buds started opening up, revealing their beautiful jasmin/frangipani smelling flowers. mmmmMMMMMmm!!! bring it on ;D
Rolley
Guess what! Finally after a couple of years Im currently drinking down my first cup of fully home grown coffee. How exciting!
Firstly, it tastes way better than I thought it would.. I was actually so disappointed with my crop, processing and roast that I didnt even bother taking any pictures, which now I think is an absolute shame - since its my first crop and all.. Damn it why didnt I just take some!! fwar!!
The taste is a bit rough, its definitely no heuheutenango but hey the sense of achievement is great.. its slightly toffee-cocoa-caramel like, with a rough hard-to-describe flavour thats probably come from basically being a fairly poor crop and dodgy processing. It doesnt have much on the sweet palette and has a bit of a sharp dry finish. Its still quite nice though.
Im really pleased with myself hey :

Its so much fun. Picking the cherries was fun, even for the kids, my daughter helped me deseed some of them, and they both help me sort the bad from the good (floaters and sinkers); the drying was a real pain and I couldnt get them dry enough.. I left them sitting around in the sun for as long as I could, but got lazy and ended up brining them inside after a couple of weeks, to sit next to the window sill.
After a couple of months they still looked a bit too moist, too dark in colour and the edges were ever so slightly transluscent.. so after some reading online I decided to dry them in the oven at 40 degrees C.. I think I did that for about 4 hours.. It seemed to help, so again I left them on the window sill for a fair few weeks..
All up I only had about 160gms, my bigger tree actually lost almost all of the cherries for some reason, not sure, they just all rotted or split - I think we had too much rain actually, and our soil is heavy clay!
Because I pan roast, the 160gms was (I thought) not quite enough to do a roast in the pan.. so I decided to just roast them in the convection oven (that was a first as well!!!).. It went supprisingly well with the temperature controls helping quite a bit (compared to roasting in the pan with no idea of temp!).
Even though the roast went okay, they smelt so strange! I left them for a week wondering whether or not I should drink them etc.. in the end, I ground them up and thats when I really went "woah this has actually worked!".. they had a very pungent aroma, still with that hint of weirdness.. sort of like the Peru Segunda Naturals - remember them? They were left to dry on the trees before being picked, and they had a strange undescribable smell and flavour.
So here I am, the cups empty and .. yeah Im very pleased with the result. I know some other CSrs have trees too so I give yas the thumbs up, maybe they can post their descriptions on this thread too?
The cycle is just about to start again too, yesterday my bigger trees first buds started opening up, revealing their beautiful jasmin/frangipani smelling flowers. mmmmMMMMMmm!!! bring it on ;D
Rolley
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