Body art and roasting

Who wants to get piersed?

That from my first trip to Panajachel.  I opted for the no option.  First, I don’t want to get piersed anywhere.  Second, for hopefully obvious reasons, I’m prejudiced against tattoo parlors that can’t spell.  Better-than-hooked-on-phonics literacy is a prerequisite for whoever inks me first.  I don’t want my tattoo cherry popped with a heart containing the word “Mawm.”  I know it's just henna, but it still lasts for two weeks...

Back in San Pedro, after two weeks of volunteering at FEDEPMA, I finally got to help out roasting coffee for an entire half day!  This comes after being told “vamos a tostar mañana” (we’re going to roast tomorrow) for at least 6 days.  I’ve learned that before the start of any given day, it’s best to not expect to do what I think I’m going to do.  FEDEPMA somehow manages to function by combining all stereotypes of non-profit inefficiency with the confusion of running a cooperative that’s trying to make a profit for its farmers, but also focused on other goals including education projects, then compounded with a very Latin American sense of time and expediency. If that sentence doesn’t make sense to you, that’s because FEDEPMA still doesn’t really make sense to me.  It’s an organizational clusterfuck, but nonetheless, the coffee eventually gets roasted, membership is a huge economic benefit to the individual farmers, and the organization does a good job of promoting organic farming and educating adolescents in the greater Atitlan region about agriculture and business administration.

Beans with the parchment.

Doña Loida and the mill.  For scale, she's about 4'9''

Cafe en oro.  No parchment.

Anyways, one of the things I did while not roasting coffee was to fertilize a small plot of coffee plants on the FEDEPMA property (most of the beans come from farms outside of the roasting center).  One of FEDEPMA’s other arms is organic fertilizer, or, in more simple terms, worm urine.  So I dug crescent-shaped ditches around each of the 129 coffee plants in this plot, then hand-poured 129 liters of worm urine, one for each plant, using a Nalgene bottle (I checked – the bottle was from before Nalgene removed BPA from its products, so I wasn’t tempted to drink).

Finally got to do some roasting on Thursday.  The process started out by removing the parchment from the beans (Coffee berries have several layers, the parchment is the last one that remains before the bean used to make a typical cup of coffee).   Doña Loida and I fed the beans through a mill 3 times to fully remove the parchment.  Then we roasted after lunch.

I really don’t want to go through the roasting process step-by-step, but I will say that, given my limited knowledge, the temperature control for the roaster is decidedly bushleague.  Basically you turn up or turn down the gas using a valve, and it’s really easy to turn up the gas too high and almost blow your face off.  If you’ve ever accidentally tried to light a gas stove after the gas has been running a little too long, hence creating a small, but startling, ball of fire, you may have experienced a faint ringing in your ears and general lightheadedness.  Well, if you turn the handle on the gas valve for FEDEPMA’s coffee roaster just 1/16^th inch too much, that ringing in your ears lasts the rest of the day.

Dipstick?  Checking the beans to see if they're done.

The belly of the beast.

Anyways, that’s it for now.  Stacy and I might help FEDEPMA employees learn to make espresso drinks, but that’s another project still to come, hopefully over the next two weeks, assuming I don’t burn my face off before then.