It is time to see if after fours years of growth we can start harvesting coffee from our base in Northeast Indonesia. Jim and Cindy Aldrich set out to get some of those precious beans. It was not as easy as it would been and believe me every cup of coffee I drink now I savor it. It is a tremendous amount of work when you consider the experimentation to get the beans off the husks and the drying process. Jim studied about the process of harvesting coffee. Cindy picked a bunch of beans and our Indonesian staff in charge of the coffee also worked hard to get those beans processed.Jim tried a wet process by soaking the beans for a day. Then the following day he used a screen and and forced the beans through the screen. The hot equatorial sun was perfect for drying the beans. Cindy and Jim had several interested helpers. Three of the helpers were burn victims--two of them had badly deformed hands due to their burns. They did their best to help sort the good beans from the pulp. There also was an old Indonesian woman who did not need any instructions--it seemed she might have done this before. These helpers and a couple others worked hours sorting and getting the husks off.
The dried beans were brought to the U.S. for roasting. They had to be sorted again and the best beans selected. Jim knows there are devices to do all this but what he wanted is to get the best beans he could to the U.S. and see if it is a good quality coffee. Will it be worth processing the coffee--we will find out in the next couple weeks. I do know that the cost of each cup of coffee will be over $ 100. It took hours and hours and many hands to get what is now ready for roasting. If it is good coffee we will call it copiriska which means "coffee of kings".
