Medium Roast | Sipi Falls

Another highlight of the Sipi trip was brewing our own coffee. While I’m not a coffee drinker, I was excited to see the local coffee production process and the end product was actually really good! I drank the whole cup, Zea would’ve been proud. :)
 
We started in Mangusho’s garden where he grows coffee beans. They’re Arabica which means they have 2 beans per berry (is it a berry?) instead of 3 beans, which would be Robusta and apparently not as good. Once the plants grow in his garden, he replants the seedlings in little bags for each to grow on their own. They grow in the shade of banana trees which is perfect for them because it keeps them out of direct sunlight. The elevation at Sipi is also ideal for good coffee plants. Melissa may have to help jog my memory on this, but I think they then grow for another 9 months before they’re ready to be planted in the soil to grown into larger trees. Mangusho showed us a coffee tree that his grandfather planted years ago – he’s carrying on a family tradition. Legend goes that that was the first coffee tree in Sipi!

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​Mangusho had heard about interesting farming methods in Brazil, the world’s largest producer of coffee. He found that instead of just planting the baby trees, they actually pin them along the ground horizontally. Apparently that can lead to up to four branches growing vertically, and you essentially get four plants for the price (and time) of one. It does deplete the soil faster, but for now, that isn’t an issue for him. How did he find this out? The internet of course! Mangusho’s coffee plants are fertilized with cow dung which he buys from local farmers at a really low cost. If bugs attack the coffee plants, instead of pesticides, Mangusho sprays the plants with tobacco which is also grown in the area. Talk about getting smoked out…

​It takes 4 weeks to dry the beans, so we jumped over that part of the process. Once you have the dry beans, you need to remove the husk. While you can do this by hand, as you can imagine, that is very tedious and time consuming.  So we used a wooden mortar and pestle. It’s important that the mortar is really deep so the beans don’t escape. Once our arms were too tired to continue, Mangusho took a plate and artfully separated the beans from the husks. 

​We’re now ready to roast the beans! I had no idea that the difference between light, medium, and dark roast is simply how long you roast them for…so self-explanatory haha. At Mangusho’s suggestion, we decided on a medium roast. The beans crackle a little kind of like the early stages of cooking popcorn on the stove. It smelled great! Once they were ready, we let the beans cool on a banana leaf. Mangusho had us try the beans – they were pretty tasty. Definitely really flavorful. I feel like describing the taste of coffee is similar to describing the taste of wine, so I’ll continue to steer clear of both. 

Then, the beans went back into the mortar and we ground them by hand…continuing our arm workout for the day! Once Mangusho was satisfied with the consistency, we poured the coffee grounds into a pot of boiling water and a few minutes later, we had a fresh batch of home brewed Arabica coffee from Sipi Falls. Mangusho, the entrepreneur that he is, is working with an Irish man he met to build a coffee coop with some of the local farmers so they have enough to export to the UK. He better move quickly though as he mentioned an American company recently started exporting coffee from the area. A quick google search also shows that select Starbucks carry Sipi Falls coffee, which they describe as “creamy sweet.”