The Bohnanza game in my dinning room.

My coffee continues to ripen. The plantation is looking healthy (I suppose Riblet is doing a good job.) I expect it won’t be long until I actually pick the coffee fruit…. which got me to wondering, what the hell do I do next?

I turned to the all-knowing internet for help. It took me a little bit more time to find the information I needed then I would have guessed. So many websites are dedicated to what you do with the coffee once it’s already in bean form. Not many concentrate on what you do with the coffee cherries (cherry is what we coffee farmers call the coffee fruit….or so I just learned).

Fortunately howstuffworks came to my rescue with a helpful article on how coffee works. One of the things that kind of surprised me is that my coffee trees know where they are (hemispherically speaking.) According to the howstuff works:

"There is usually one coffee harvest per year. The time varies according to geographic zone, but generally, north of the Equator, harvest takes place between September and March, and south of the equator between April and May."

My coffee trees have never been outside; they live a very sheltered life (both literally and figuratively.) They’ve only had a crazy gray cat to tell them what’s right and wrong. I wonder how they figured out where they are and when to be harvested….I guess it has to be based off the sun, all other environmental triggers (temperature, amount of rain, weather, etc) are more or less controlled and never change. However, I like to imagine that living in a gadget rich environment they’ve manage to tap into GPS.

The website says that the actual fruit of the coffee cherry is “intensely sweet and has the texture of a grape.” From what I understand it is usually discarded because it perishes too quickly and isn’t where the money is. I suppose I have a chance to try a fruit that I’ll probably never see in the local grocery store.

The website also has a page dedicated to how cherries are processed, which is what I really wanted to learn about. Evidently there are two ways to go. There’s the old fashion traditional way called the dry method:

"Dry method - By the simplest and cheapest method, the harvested cherries are spread out to dry in sunlight. They are periodically raked and turned for seven to 10 days, until their moisture content has fallen to 11 percent. The outer shell of the cherries turns brown and the beans rattle around inside."

Then there is the fancy schmancy wet method:

"Wet method - The main difference between the wet and dry method is that in the wet method, the pulp of the coffee cherry is removed from the beans within 24 hours of harvesting. A pulping machine washes away the skin and pulp. The beans are put in fermentation tanks for 12 to 48 hours. Natural enzymes loosen the slimy parenchyma from the parchment covering. The beans are then dried, either by the sun or by mechanical dryers."

Since I don’t have a pulping machine or a coffee cherry fermentation tank handy it looks like the dry method is the one for me. Perhaps I can talk Riblet into batting them around the room in lieu of periodically raking them.