This afternoon another new coffee will be added to the board - Glasgow's turn as Edinburgh got this little beauty over the weekend! Jamie and myself roasted this for the first time on friday and it was such a pleasure.
Like the name states its picked in August, the coffee is grown under heavy shade where they keep their own micro-climate due to the fact of shade and the absence of sunlight. The heat and wind lifting the clouds up and sending the precious moisture away is prevented by the shade and windbreaks and keeps the coffee in this area cool and moist.
All of these coffee trees were planted in 1931 and are Kent/Bourbon varietals. They had never been irrigated thus their root system reaches the deep volcanic soil layers.
Picking starts at 8am. The pickers were instructed to pick only ripe coffee and were supervised to make sure that this happened. The task was set to 54 kg of cherries per picker, not ripe or over ripe cherries had to be sorted out by hand - the more experienced pickers were allowed to pick much more then the task and they made it up to 145 kg of 1st quality cherry. Picking stopped when the sun carried the mist away.
The coffee was pulped in the afternoon and fermented for 14 hours then carried by people to the elevated sun drying tables until hours before grading and washing in the water channel. With a moisture content of 11.5% it was then finally conditioned in bins until transportation to Moshi.
Pulping is then carried out using zero water. Pulp transportation water is constantly recycled. This year a lot more water was used then the previous year for the 'Shade of September' - the reason is that there was much more sugar-mucilage in the cherry and 'Shade of September' was a very dry year and the sugar content was much lower. *part of the washing water was used for pulp transportation the next day.
The Coffee was transported on the 25.08.2010 to Rafiki coffee mill in Moshi and finally cured on the 22.10.2010.
This will be roasted this afternoon.
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