Home Coffee (Home-roasted, that is)
1:30pm, the jiko is stoked, though it’ll be a while before the coals are hot. This afternoon I’ve come home in the early afternoon to roast coffee, two kilograms of raw beans I bought at the market in Dodoma. I’ve never roasted my own coffee before, here or back home, but I somehow feel that this setting — in a do-it-yourself Peace Corps atmosphere, in the bush in the middle of East Africa’s fertile coffee producing highlands, and on my own tiny little charcoal stove — makes it all the more appropriate.
Green coffee or rocks? Hard to tell...
While in Dodoma for the Peace Corps “gathering,” I stopped at the market to buy some green coffee beans. Take a look at these things and they hardly look green. There is a world of difference between these beans which have been sitting out in the open for who knows how long before they made it from the farm to the market to my hands and the beans I’ve seen at roasteries back home, all carefully stored in climate-controlled closets. Many of these beans haven’t even been properly de-pulped, and not only did I find a few rocks in the batch but also a couple of maharage, the kind of beans I douse my rice with. While I waited for the coals on the stove to heat up to temperature I ground up the last of some coffee beans brought to me straight from ATX (thanks Chelsey and Bethel!). This is a good way to pass some time before I can begin roasting unless I want to blister my fingers fanning the coals like crazy with a bucket lid or my MUFA frisbee. Frisbees, like donated mosquito nets, have a seemingly endless number of uses here.
- stirring… and stirring… and stirring…
The coals are hot and I throw 2 kilos of green coffee in my giant sufuria, the same one I transform into an oven on ocassion. My trusty kipekecheo, usually used for stirring some ratio of maize flour to water into uji or ugali, is the perfect tool for the job. Constant stirring is essential. Too bad I burned a few beans in the first 15 minutes. It’s hard to keep the lid on to contain the heat and to keep stirring to prevent the beans from burning, but I stir and stir and stir and after 40 minutes the beans don’t look anywhere near roasted enough so I close the lid to keep more heat inside, picking the whole thing up to shake it every 30 seconds or so. This seems to work better. I continue for another 30 minutes or so until the last of my coals die and I have no choice but to finish up. I pick up the sufuria and splash my hot beans onto my mkeka to cool.
Once the beans cool I make some attempt at grinding. This proves to be a tedious process with so many beans and such a small mortar and pestle but I put on my headphones and twanga my little heart out ’til my hands get tired. And it takes a loooong time, but fills up three peanut butter buckets. I’ll have plenty of coffee to make me bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to greet my Form II math students in the morning as we pound away at the few topics we’ve got to cover in the month remaining before their national exams.
When I finished I had a cup of my fresh home-roasted coffee, and though it’s certainly not the most delicious cup of coffee I’ve ever enjoyed, it is by far the most satisfying.
- Roasted coffee of all colors
