Coffee, Coffee, Coffee!!!

Hello all! Nichole here :) Welcome to my first Jamaican blog! I hope you’re as excited as I am. So looking at our blogs so far, I feel like we need to add a little more information on our day to day life. And so, as you saw in my profile, earlier today I got the opportunity to learn how coffee down here is made. Every week as part of my job, I help take the coffee orders from the group and deliver the amount needed to Lenny, a.k.a. Coffee Man. Fortunately, today I had some down time and decided to actually go help out.

The process starts with the coffee growers. If there are any coffee lovers out there reading, you might be familiar with the fact that Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee is extremely expensive. Lucky for this coffee lover, it’s a lot cheaper down here. So Won by One would buy and sell the coffee to the teams at this cheaper rate. Recently, however, it was discovered that there were some farmers in Harmons growing coffee, but with no market in which to sell. So Harmony House Coffee was born.

Today Lenny informed me that every winter the coffee down here is harvested. The Harmony House will buy it in bulk from the local farmers and store it in a small coffee room off of the courtyard. The large bags have to be hanging so that the air can keep the coffee beans cool so they don’t sweat and get ruined. When the bags are hanging like this, the beans will last up to 2 years.

So, now that there are teams here, every week we give them the opportunity to buy the coffee and the process begins. First the beans are roasted on an open fire. For good roasted beans it takes about 45 minutes of slow roasting and stirring in a small pot. There are probably only about 8 or 9 pounds that are roasted at a time. I got the chance to do some stirring myself, and let me tell you, with the heat and smoke from the fire added to the hot temperature of Jamaica itself, it gets pretty darn hot. Lenny also showed off his arm muscles that he has accumulated from stirring coffee for so many years.

After the coffee is roasted (which smells wonderful by the way), the Jamaicans dump the hot beans onto a screen type contraption that has a large fan positioned underneath to start the cooling process. The beans only take about 10 to 15 minutes to cool. Then they are dumped into smaller bowls. Once there is a fair amount of beans ready, they are poured into small bags and measured to be one pound each. (Technically we made sure that the scale was 1.02 lbs to take into account the weight of the bag, so no worries, everyone gets exactly one pound of delicious caffeinated coffee). We take orders for both beans and ground coffee, so for the ground, we measured the coffee beans first to make sure we had enough, then put them into a big grinder, then scooped the grinds into the bags. At that time the bags are sealed closed with a heat pressure thing so no air can get in and they will stay fresh for at least a year. Next we took the bags and slipped them into our nice burlap Harmony House Coffee bags. Tomorrow some of the team members will help with sewing on the labels.

Voila! My coffee experience was complete.

I really enjoyed being able to watch and help with this part of Jamaica. I love coffee and now I can say that I actually prepared some from scratch. I am definitely planning on helping again next week! I hope you enjoyed reading about a small part of Jamaican culture.