Expert Coffee tips

Follow the easy steps from picking the ripe cherries off your Coffee plant to sipping your home made Coffee.

Harvesting the Cherries. Collect the deep red cherries and soak them in water overnight. This allows the cherries to give up the beans easily the following day.

Coffee beans being removed after soaking overnight

Removing Slippery Layer. Back into the water to ferment, where natural enzymes break down the slippery layer and remove it. This will take a couple of days.

 Drying the Beans. The beans are dried on a paper towel in a sunny window. The beans need to lose 90% of their moisture. Test this by biting into a bean; if it is still soft and chewy, place it back in the sun to dry until hard and dry.

 Removing the Parchment. Next, remove the Parchment – a thin paper skin, a little labour-intensive with your fingers but relaxing. You can use a food processor with a plastic blade to speed this process up.

Coffee Bean parchment

Roasting the Coffee Beans. Once the parchment is removed, you have beans with a silver skin on them, and this does not need to be removed to be roasted. At this stage, you can store your beans in a sealed, air-tight container and roast as required.

 To roast, use a cast iron frying pan and put on with the extractor fan. We do not want the smoke alarms going off. Once the pan is smoking, add the beans. Keep them moving, and slowly they will change colour and start to make a cracking noise.

 Cooling down and removing Silver Skin. As the beans lose moisture and caramelise the darker they go. I took them off the heat when they were brown for a medium roast. But experiment for the fullness and strength of your coffee taste, choosing between a light brown for a mild taste to black beans for a strong flavour.

Coffee Bean roasting

Once the beans are off the heat, turn them into a metal colander and keep them moving to cool them down. Once cool enough, use your fingers to help remove the silver skin. Gently blow on them to blow away the skins – outside, of course.

Coffee Bean roasted

Into your food processor and grind away; it is very noisy!!

 Once fine enough into the coffee maker. Not long, and you will be sipping delicious coffee made with your own hands.

 Not so difficult to make the No 1 drug in the world, and it is legal! All you need is a beautiful coffee plant, your kitchen and yourself.

Enjoy