How to make great coffee!


1. Live on a finca ("farm")
Somewhere with hot sun and a lot of space where you can spread out the coffee seeds to dry. For example, Nicaragua (above)... This is where my tent broke, which I subsequently fixed with a pen and duct-tape.


2. Find some shade
These days, coffee is cultivated in rows, directly under the sun using loads of fertilisers. This causes the coffee berries to ripen quicker and produces the highest yield. However, the traditional method to cultivate coffee is in shade. This causes the berries to ripen slower, and it produces lower yields, but the quality of resulting coffee is allegedly superior. Not to mention, the environmental effects are so much less: less deforestation, pesticide pollution, habitat destruction, and soil and water degradation.


3. Buy a machete
Personally, I think the best coffee comes from Latin America because they do everything old school. They don't have so much money so they cultivate using the traditional methods and harvest by hand - with the aide of a really big knife, of course. This is opposed to being strip-picked by machine regardless of their ripeness.

4. Grow a moustache
Just do it!

5. Remove the slime
After the flesh of the berry is removed, usually by machine, the seeds (usually called beans) are fermented to remove the slimy layer still on them, after which they are thoroughly washed.



6. Get some sun
The washed beans are then dried. One of the traditional ways to do this is to spread out the beans over concrete and rake over and rotate them under the sun. Having a moustache helps with this process.


7. Make like a chicken and roast!
Roasting changes the coffee bean physically and chemically. As the starches in the bean changes to simple sugars, the bean browns.

8. Screw the little man
Pay your workers a couple of dollars for a day of hard labour and export the coffee internationally so that corporations can sell it for a 2000% markup.
E.g.
Cost to buy 250g of coffee from a bean farmer - US$0.55
Cost to buy 250g of coffee from a supermarket - US$11.00