It took me a while from hours of video and hundreds of photos but here is a short video to help better understand the processing of coffee on the farm in Tanzania. (The background music is sung by the Orera villagers where we also buy coffee!)
Transcript from Video
- Careful selection of each hand picked cherry helps define the crop quality.
- Bringing in the harvest. Pickers carry their cherries back to the farm to be processed.
- Back at the farm. Each picker lines up to get their cherries measured and processed.
- Bucket by bucket each day’s harvest is measured and recorded before the washing process begins. From the collection basin the cherries now pass to the pulper to remove the pulp from the fruit and get the beans (seeds) from within.
- The pulper separates the pulp and directs it into a storage tank where it is later dried to make cascara (a tea-like drink). The coffee beans are directed into the washing channels for cleaning and to further sort quality.
- The coffee beans now rest in their own watery sugar solution to ferment until a second washing to further separate any remaining pulp.
- then it’s carried to the sorting racks to be hand-sorted for stones and defects and laid out to dry naturally in the African sun.
- Finally the beans are bagged and weighed before being sent to the mill to have their husk removed and be graded, and bagged for export.
Some additional footage of the farmers on the Machare farm recorded five years earlier.
