Look away now....

...if you don’t want to see coffee production on a boutique coffee plantation in Australia.

Fertile volcanic soil here is our friend and it produces what the coffee aficionados call a “sweet” Arabica coffee, lacking the bitterness of some.

We handpick and sun dry, so we can literally “cherry pick” when the cherries are at the peak stage of ripeness. Large commercial plantations have to use machinery for the whole process.

Yesterday was our first pick of the season, not a large one, but enough to get us going. We soaked the cherries overnight, then today we put them through the pulper (pictured) to separate the cherry pulp from the coffee parchment. The parchment is a little nut like shell that contains 2 coffee beans.

Are you asleep yet?

The now denuded parchment is soaked again for a day or so to rid it of a slimy substance that surrounds it...and that’s where we are up to at the moment....phew!

The extras show the picked cherries and the pulper spitting out the parchment.

Watch this space.