Cherry Picking

When we bought this land along with some friends a few years ago, nine out of the 16-odd acres was planted with Arabica coffee. Initially we tried to look after the coffee plantation using organic methods – jivamrta, intercropping, that kind of thing. Nine acres is a huge area though. Our hands were more than full with building structures and setting up community life on the jungle land, and we didn’t want to hand over the maintenance of the plantation to anyone else as we knew they would use conventional chemical methods. So we increasingly left the coffee to fend for itself.

Five years on, the soil is covered in a rich leaf litter; creepers, shrubs, baby trees and brambles have covered every conceivable gap; and our coffee plants are tall and spindly rather than broad and bushy. They are also fighting for survival with the jungle’s native animal inhabitants, including the elephants who spent most of the Christmas and New year’s break camping in our jungli plantation as well as in our jungle land. The coffee plants don’t give too many cherries but the few that are produced are wonderfully sweet and juicy compared to those of our neighbours’ manicured estates.

With such a small harvest we decided to pick the coffee ourselves this year, with the help of friends and volunteers. One of the perks of harvesting is snacking on the cherries while you pick. We all enjoyed the fruit so much I started to think of ways to preserve it.

Coffee processing in Sakleshpur usually follows one of two methods: dry hulling, where the whole cherries are dried in the sun for ten days and then hulled and wet hulling, where the fresh cherries are passed through a special machine with plenty of water to separate them from the bean. In both, the fruit is not used at all, except to make a mulch after the wet-hulling method.

It seems such a waste not to use something so sweet, and it turns out the coffee cherry also has some serious health benefits. Move over kombucha…

After two and a half hours of squeezing coffee beans out of the cherries though I was beginning to understand why people don’t bother. It’s fiddly and takes a hell of a long time. Still, once de-beaned, the coffee cherries are fairly versatile and can be made into all kinds of things or dehydrated for later use.

So far we have managed to make coffee jam and coffee jelly; recipes below. I see there are companies selling coffee fruit tea from the rehydrated fruit and coffee extract. Apparently even Starbucks had a coffee fruit latte at one point. But that’s all a bit out of my league.

Right now I am content to bask in the fact that we are creating a super food out of a waste product.

Coffee Jam:
Remove beans from fruit.
Boil 3 cups beans with 1-1.5 cups sugar and 1-2 lemons and enough water.
When water has reduced and is syrupy, blend roughly.
Then boil again (should change from red sludge colour to strong dark red) and bottle.

Coffee Jelly:
Boil 2 cups whole berries, with beans, in 3 cups water. Squeeze out berries and then strain.
Mix 1/3 cup pectin with 4 cups sugar and add to the mixture, stirring vigorously.
Add 1/3 cup lemon.
Then heat until boiling up to top of pan. Boil for one minute and bottle.