🔗 Small-Payoff Hobbies, Part 1: Growing My Own Coffee

Amongst the many hobbies I pretend to fill my time with, I find that some are quite demanding hobbies with very little payoff. Not all of them, but some. Beer brewing and bread baking are very fulfilling and high yielding hobbies. Woodworking and sewing produce tools that I actually use, but the effort is high.

In this pointless series, I'll be showcasing some of my most pointless hobbies. I'll start with a particularly obvious one: growing my own coffee.

About six years ago, I bought a small coffea arabica plant from a nursery, mostly as a gimmick. Arabica is the most common cultivar of the coffee plant, and most coffee you buy is arabica coffee, but there's also robusta, and I suppose there's some obscure cultivars too. Robusta beans are larger compared to arabica beans, and also contain more caffeine.

Growing coffee in a place like Israel is supposed to be somewhat difficult. Arabica is mostly grown at altitudes above 1,000 meters and is not particularly heat tolerant. Still, I'm successfully growing coffee at sea level in the Israeli heat.

The plant grew well in the years since I got it. I planted it in soil inside a relatively large container. In the first two years, I was feeding the plant with BioBizz organic fertilizers on a daily basis. I placed it in the corner of the balcony, where two walls meet to provide it some shade. I also like to add mycorrhiza fungi to the soil.

After two years, I moved, and placed the plant in a well shaded side of the backyard. After that, I no longer fed it with any liquid fertilizers, and instead switched to slow-releasing organic fertilizers that need to be replenished every six months or so.

I've had two good yielding seasons from the plant. The first time it fruited, it fruited a lot. The plant grows many white flowers that disappear almost as quickly as they appear, and in their place the coffee cherries start to grow.

The cherries start out green, and grow until they reach a size of medium gumballs. When ripe, they turn a bright red. Their flesh is edible and sweet, but the plants are grown for what's inside the cherry: the bean. Arabica coffee beans are small, milky green, full of caffeine, and also hold various antioxidants and flavor compounds.

Once the cherries are ripe, I harvest them by simply picking them off with my hands, which is less fun the more cherries you have, and they're quite juicy, making your hands nice and sticky.

After harvesting, one needs to extract the beans. This can be quite difficult right after picking, so I soak the cherries in water for about 24 hours, which softens the cherries and makes them much easier to break. The next day, I break open the cherries by squeezing them one by one with my hands, forcing the beans out. This takes a long time, and you end up with a lot of coffee juice coating your shirt and everything else in the vicinity, and your hands get blood red as if you just murdered someone.

But longer manual labor is still ahead. The beans we've just extracted still have a hard skin on them. Plus, we need to dry them. Technically, we could leave this skin on, but it hurts the roasting process later on. So to get the skins off, we need to soak the beans in water and let them ferment for a few days.

Once fermented (which also reduces the caffeine content of the beans, especially if you replace the water several times), the beans are ready to be dried. For this, you can use an oven, but a specialized food dehydrators are better. Household ones are quite cheap, but my Ninja toaster oven also has a dryer setting. I dehydrate the wet beans at a temperature of 45 degrees Celsius for about 12 hours (most sources will tell you that more time is needed, but it looks plenty dry to me after 12 hours).

Once dried, removing the skin is an easy, multi-hour process that's torture on your hands. I tried to use my grain mill from my beer brewing to separate the skin from the beans quickly and painlessly, but it didn't work. So what I do is use a mortar and pestle to crack or at least weaken the skins, after which it can be taken off with your fingers, like how you would crack open pistachio shells.

At this point, I finally have in my hands the same green beans I could easily have bought at the store. Now comes the time to roast them. The worst possible way to do that is on the stove top, in a cast iron skillet, so that's what I do. It's so smokey that you'd much rather do it outside.

I preheat the cast iron skillet to about 200 degrees Celsius and dump in the beans. I keep the induction cooker at a low-medium level, which is somewhat equivalent to medium-high heat on a gas stove top. This thing is a beast. The roasting process will not take long, but is made more annoying by having to constantly stir the beans so that they don't burn.

As the beans heat, they're supposed to go through two stages known as "first crack" and "second crack". At these points, the beans pop loudly, not unlike popcorn, as the pressure inside them gets abruptly released. If you could control the roasting temperature and keep it even throughout the beans, you'd supposedly hear the first crack, and after a few minutes the second crack, but in a cast iron skillet under constant stirring the temperature is not particularly even, and once you start to hear cracking, you continue to hear it pretty much until the end, so I have no idea which are first cracks and which are second.

You can take the beans off the skillet whenever you like. Some like lighter roasts, some darker roasts. I prefer a darker one, so I roast longer, but regardless of your preference, you'd be wise to take the beans off the skillet before they reach your desired level, as they'll continue to roast and darken for a few minutes after that.

After turning off the cooker, I dump the beans onto a flax linen baker's couche to cool off. They're still roasting, and still smoking, so they need a few minutes. After a while I fold the couche over them and give them a few more minutes, before storing them in an airtight container. Just like you could have bought at the store, but less. Much less.

At this point, with roasted coffee beans at room temperature, you're ready to wait a bit more. According to most sources, you need to wait at least five days after roasting and before grinding your beans to make coffee, as the beans need time to fully degas (they give off carbon dioxide for several days) and for flavor to improve. Fuck those sources. I drink it whenever I like because I love freedom and they don't.

So now, finally, after months and months of work, I can make myself two cups of mediocre coffee. To be honest, though, the coffee is actually good. Every source I had read before getting the plant told me not to expect good quality coffee, but I was pleasantly surprised. The coffee was good.

The first time I brewed my own coffee, I ground the beans by hand in a ceramic hand grinder and brewed using the drip method. Since then I bought one of those automatic coffee machines that do everything by themselves, including grinding.

I've noticed that a lot more nurseries sell coffee plants now than did when I bought mine. That's a good sign, meaning popularity is growing, and plants are probably more adept to Israeli climates.

The year after the plant's first high yielding season, it did not fruit. This year, however, it fruited again, not as much as that first season, but still quite a lot. At the end of the day, a single coffee plant, even a high yielding one, will not get you a lot of coffee drinks, and you have to work at it. The more plants you grow, the more work. It's better to just give up on coffee, it's addictive, screw it.