11 Attachment(s)
How to make a cup of coffee
First chop down 4 out of the 5 strange bushes growing in your garden before thinking of taking a pic and posting online to find out what they are.
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Once you find out that they are coffee bushes refrain from cutting down the the last one and wait till the cherries turn from green to red before picking them off (the coffee bush blunder was 2 years ago and the mistakenly axed ones have bounced back fairly quickly).
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Mash the beans in a pestle like what they use to make som tam.
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Don't throw the cherry flesh away as it is sweet and yummy.
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You can eat it or you can dry it and use the fried flesh to make herbal tea.... coffee tea! You can even make tea from the fresh flesh.
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Dry the defleshed beans for a few days until the outer covering turns papery white.
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Mash the dried beans with the pestle again to remove the papery covering and inside you will find the coffee beans which are not brown but rather a kind of olive green.
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Don't feel disappointed and inadequate if your beans appear smaller than other fella's beans. These are green beans and they will swell up with pride and vigour during roasting.
Roast the green beans in a pan for about 10 minutes or until they start to turn brown.
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When you are roasting after about 5 minutes you will hear the 'first crack' which is like a kind of popcorn noise the beans make as they get contorted by the heat and the oils start to migrate from the bean centre and the Maillard reaction begins.
This is the start of light roast and you can stop now if you want.
Or you can continue towards second crack which is another cracking stage when approaching a dark roast via the post-maillard caramelisation process.
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Try to under-cook it as the beans will go on roasting for a few minutes even after removed from the heat.
Be careful to whip them off second crack at the latest as very soon you will have charcoal beans if you don't cool them down.
Now leave the beans to settle for a couple of days in a sealed container in the fridge. This process is called degassing and lets CO2 formed during roasting escape from the beans. If you grind it to soon there will be incomplete degassing which makes for an uneven flavour.
Grind the beans after they have breathed for 2 days
Now make your coffee in a 12 bar coffee machine
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And finally settle down to meditate and feel your neurons popping like roasting coffee beans in your pre-frontal cortex
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