Coffee!!!

My week was full and stressful, yet again. Lol. I had an exam this morning and then we only have one more week of lecture and a final and we will be done and I'll be coming back home. I'm sad to leave this experience behind, but I am really excited to see my family and friends back home again. I'm really excited about the Joust tomorrow. I have never seen a Joust before, except in movies, so that should be really fun! They take this event really seriously around here. I think it is about comparable, if not more of a big deal to these people than OU - TX is to major football fans. They have been having raves outside ALL week. Every night they have played loud bumping music and had tens of people out in the piazza by my apartment screaming and doing karaoke. I'm hoping after the event that part settles down, because it makes it really hard to study, and I have not got much sleep this week. I also think I may have a stomach bug or something so I'm not feeling very good. My stomach hurts and I have a headache and just wanted to sleep for a while without interruption, but I guess that won't really happen around here, because my upstairs neighbors are blaring music and stomping around and being really loud now, so I figured I would write out a blog post instead of trying to sleep. Then I might just go to the park and relax for a while. 

We had a coffee tasting in class this week, which was kind of neat. I felt I could actually smell the aromas more in the coffee than I did with the wine tasting (mostly I smelled alcohol with those). With this coffee tasting, the first one we tasted (Ethiopia coffee) had a mild fruit smell to it, which I found really interesting because I have never noticed a fruit smell in coffee before... I actually could taste it a little bit too, but maybe my mind was just telling me I was tasting it because my teacher told me it was there. I'm not really sure. The grounds of this coffee actually just smelled "dirty" to me and I couldn't smell any fruit smell there, but I definitely could in the liquid coffee. It didn't have a really strong flavor, but it also wasn't weak either and I tasted a hint of cherry, which I really enjoyed. After that we tried a coastarican coffee. I only smelled coffee aroma in this one, and it was a little stronger than the first one. I didn't really care for this coffee. My teacher said he smelled bell pepper smell in it, but I did not get that at all. 

We got to go to a coffee roastary this week and it was really cool. I think I actually enjoyed this visit more than I have the winery visits. We learned a lot about their process at the plant and I was really fascinated by it. I never even thought about how coffee was made before really, but now I know a quite a bit! The place we went was named Cafe River (I "liked" them and tagged myself in a picture at their plant!!). It seems like a pretty big place to me, but the guy that gave us the tour said only about 3 people run most of it. He took us into a lab, where we learned a little of the chemistry aspect of this. I found it interesting that their lab is very small. It was smaller than my kitchen at home is (which is in a single wide mobile home, so you can imagine that it is not very big)! They have several different tools they use to identify if the product they are receiving from over seas is in fact the quality they want in their products. 1st, They have these trays with a sort of sifter in them that stack on top of each other and are numbered according to the size of the holes. I didn't completely understand what he was saying about this, but I looked it up on google and found that they want larger beans, because that indicates bigger density (which is a clue the beans were from higher altitude) and suggests more flavor in the bean. Then they put the coffee in this little machine that tests for a certain toxin that could be harmful in high doses to make sure their beans do not have a high enough dosage to cause problems for consumers. They They also have a little machine that measures humidity, and I think he was saying if there is too much they can then remove the humidity from the beans to make sure the beans aren't "watered down". They heat them with an infra red light, which I guess caused some problems before they fine tuned it (the beans began roasting during the process... Ooops.). He also said this can remove some of the flavor of the bean, but I guess that negative is better than having coffee that is watery. I also learned this week that coffee beans actually come in cherries. Who knew? I never really thought about it, but I didn't think something so robust would come from a fruit! The beans are actually protected by many layers inside, then the cherry on the outside. The process of extracting the bean is another story, and there are several methods to doing it, but they do not do this at the plant we went to... They order "green" beans, which is how the bean is before they roast it.

These are the trays they use to test the size of the beans...

Machine used to test for toxins. I can't remember if he said any specific ones or not. 

Humidity machine. 

This ... Is a coffee bean cherry! :) 

Then this is a cherry he busted open, so you can see all the layers of protection, and the green bean that is inside. 

Once the beans pass all of these pre-tests, they go through a sorting process. They are sent through this huge silo looking machine to sort wood, metal, stones, and any foreign objects out of the batch of beans. After they are sorted in this machine they are taken through these huge tubes through the ceiling and into another room into the roaster. The roaster has a compartment where it holds the beans until it is hot enough to roast them. They roast the beans at 210 degrees C!! I think he was saying they start at a lower temp and work up to 210 C, but I'm not sure if he just meant the cool beans coming in cool it down and it has to be heated back up after, or if there is some reason for beginning the process at a lower heat and then going to higher. The roasting process takes about 15 to 20 minutes, and I think he said they can roast 240 kilo at a time. They have a little thing that hooks into the machine and twists in place that they can untwist and pull out to see how the roasting is coming along through the process. Once they are content with the roast the beans have received, they are released into this huge vat that immediately starts spinning the coffee around. It is like a huge blender, and the purpose of doing this is to cool the beans so they do not continue to cook after they are done roasting. Once the cooling process is done, then the beans are sent to a second silo that looks almost identical to where the foreign objects are sorted out, but this one has a scale in it, and they can punch in whatever the desired recipe is (like 70% of one bean to 30% of a different kind of bean) in a computer they have all the way upstairs that pulls the correct amount of bean mixture into a bin that holds them, until they are ready to package. Then they have a little packaging machine right there by the holding bins that bags and puts the coffee into cases for them.. I had no idea so much went into making coffee, and to think that this is just the ROASTING process. There is a lot more that I have learned about during class that happens before this point, but I won't get too much into the details of all that now. 

Sorting machine that takes out foreign objects from the bean mixture. 

This is the cooling area, where the beans are moved around and cooled by the air movement to prevent over cooking. 

This is the 2nd silo the beans go into (after being roasted) where they are stored until they punch in a recipe upstairs and pull the beans up through the green tubes seen here into another holding bin. 

These square containers are where the beans go once they're pulled up for a specific recipe. 

This is the computer they use to do a majority of the work the stuff they have to do at the plant, which explains a lot better how 3 people can mostly run it by themselves. 

Well. That about sums up this last several days. I hope you enjoyed learning about this process as much as I did...Because you should ... It is cool. LOL!!!