The climate of the sub-tropics is well suited to Coffee arabica; the longer ripening period produces sweeter and more complex flavours than when grown in the tropics.
Our plants are grown using environmentally friendly farming practices that promote ecosystem health. We can proudly say our coffee is pesticide free.
Flowering takes place after spring rains from October through December. Flowers last only 2-3 days and are sweetly scented. In a heavy flowering the plantation looks like it is covered by a blanket of snow! The fruit remains pinhead in size for 4 to 8 weeks.
The fruit that we harvest is called a “cherry”. It grows slowly over 12-months to the size of a plump cherry – first green in colour then, as it ripens through the winter months, orange then red and then deep purple when it is ready to harvest. Upon ripening, the cherry’s hold on the branch loosens, which makes it easy to pick.
Some cherries ripen earlier than others and by the time it comes to harvest, these have dried on the tree and resemble a shrivelled grape or raisin. These are called ‘raisin’ cherries or ‘naturals’.
The plantation is laid out in hedgerows. This allows the self-propelled harvester to straddle the hedgerow and tickle the ripe cherries from the trees. The operator carefully controls the rotation and oscillation speed of the fiberglass fingers. Ripe cherries fall on to a conveyor belt that moves the crop into bins ready for processing.
We do a small amount of hand picking of the early- or late-ripening cherries.
Red cherries are pulped and washed, removing the flesh and mucilage and leaving wet parchment-covered beans. These ‘parchment’ beans are then dried to 12% moisture under carefully controlled conditions.
Black ‘raisin’ cherries are sun-dried to produce ‘natural’ beans, keeping intact the outer dried flesh and all the sugars it contains. We use these beans to add complexity and body to our darker styles of coffee.
We store our parchment and naturals in a controlled environment until immediately before hulling.
To prepare the beans for roasting, we put them through a hulling machine. The mechanical process removes the outer layers of the natural beans and parchment to reveal the green bean. It is the green bean that we roast. We do this on an as needs basis, ensuring the green bean we roast is as fresh as possible.
The heartbeat of our farm is the Kahawa Roastery. Here we roast and package once a week to ensure the coffee we send to you is as fresh as possible.
Over time we have developed and refined roasting profiles on our Has Garanti roaster to suit our two styles of coffee. Roasting to these profiles allows us to produce consistently high-quality coffee from roast to roast.
We spend a lot of time and effort in the growing and processing of our coffee beans. So all of our coffee bags are foil-lined, and have a one-way valve, to keep the beans fresh and maximise their flavour. Because we want to be sure our coffee arrives to you in the same quality it left us.