Because the island of Sumatra uses a very manual process, the depulping mill may be shared among several farms or a community, and the leaders of the community arrange for it to be borrowed by a family on harvest day. I found a you-tube video showing this exact process here. The next step is called “de pulping” which is the process of removing the outer layer of fleshy cherry from the coffee seed. Imagine the coffee cherry like a peach (though a peach is much larger) and so you have a sticky, moist, wet fruit over the hard bean/seed center which the family want to get at. Next time you walk into a Starbucks and look at the coffee wall, imagine one tree for every bag of coffee on the wall, and all the work that went in to getting the coffee bean from tree to the shelf at Starbucks.Ī family then harvests their lot of 200 so trees together, with perhaps 4 or 5 heads working to pluck off the ready coffee cherries for processing. One coffee tree at harvest time produces enough coffee cherries for about one pound of beans. This tiny in comparison to many areas in Latin America where it would not be surprising to encounter a farm with 2,000 coffee trees. The many farmers of Sumatra have very small farms, with the average farm only having about 200 trees on it. This would be the very starting point of the growing region. For a comparison of the altitude, if a Seattlelite drives east over Snoqualmie Pass the summit of the pass is at about 3000 feet. This small Indonesian island is the birthplace of Sumatra coffee, processed, and created in a unique way steeped in tradition, and un-replicated anywhere else in the world.Ĭoffee trees in Sumatra grow on small farms at high altitudes from above 3000 feet to even 6000 feet and harvested from about May to October. The endangered Sumatran tiger roams – close to near extinction – on this hot, moist, tropical island where lush Sumatran pines, rhododendron, and bamboo color the landscape. Starbucks Sumatra and Aged Sumatra Coffee postage Stamps
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