Our last Monday in San Juan our team and our two squad leaders, Kylie and Joey, got to go to one of the long term missionaries houses to have lunch and just hang out at their house and rest. On top of all that we got to help them roast coffee that the couple grows on their property! This was one of my favorite experiences thus far on the race. Just the whole process and how coffee gets made is something that I’ve always wanted to know so it was really cool for this family to open up their home and show us.
When we first got there we spent about an hour and a half before lunch separating the beans after they’d been dried out and shucked. Here they dry out their coffee in the berry form, they call it cafe uva, this allows the coffee to keep its flavor unlike how major coffee companies dry them out. Major coffee companies remove it from the berry and then dry them out. You can seriously taste the difference. The shucking process is when they remove the outer skin of grape so that you can get to the bean before its been roasted, which the call the brgamino. We separates out the bad beans and any of the skins that were still there after they’d been shucked so that we could prepare the beans to be roasted.
When it was time to roast the beans we put them in a giant pot over a fire. This process took about an hour. One thing that all of us were really shocked to see was how much bigger the beans got when they were being roasted. During the roasting process Angelica told us about how a lot of coffee companies leave the skins in there cause they think that they are enhancing the flavor, but they actually don’t. To remove them from the beans while they’re roasting we had to chaff them, just like they chaff wheat in the bible. When they were done roasting we put them in a basket and just sifted through them so that they could cool down, cause you know nobody likes burnt coffee! So much care and love goes into coffee making its really beautiful!
Then of course we ground up the final product and french pressed us a nice cup of warm joe! This day was so great and one that I will never forget. A lot of us on our team love coffee and it was so special to all of us for this family to invite us and help them. Preparing coffee is something that a lot of people here in Honduras do all the time and we were so over joyed to just learn from them and help. Also who’s going to turn down taking home home-grown and roasted Honduran coffee? Not me!
