Extraordinary learning morning here...................

...........at the market today. Kawiala, who is a solo singer slack-key guitar player at the market every week, drinks our coffee and chats with us on break. He is a chemist by trade but now does what he enjoys a bit more. His music and CD's are beautiful. While talking about dehydration processes here he mentioned that he worked on the mainland for a company 'Coffeeberry.org' that dehydrated the whole coffee fruit. Coffeeberry.org now has a patent on this process and freeze dries it for health food and drink additives. Coffee fruit is full of polyphenols and anti-oxidants. My what we do by accident!?!! Ron & I love to just pick our coffee (berry/cherry?) and bite into the whole fruit and after chewing the sweetness out of the pulp which you can either eat or spit out but leave the beans in your mouth and suck on them as they have a sweet coating. Sometimes visitors ask if you can eat the cherry and we show them this process. Now we have a health food angle to tell them about, too!! All this and I remind myself that I didn't even know how coffee grew until about a year ago. I saw Juan Valdez picking it on TV, but his trees seem short and I didn't know if they were trees or vines. Maybe this has been an extraordinary week but I also experimented with the coffee by having another coffee roaster roast my coffee. All the coffee I sell is roasted in a drum roaster which gives it the smooth smokey flavor. So I tried his air roasting method and roasted it medium. Couldn't wait to bring it home and try it. Well I absolutely loved it even more than the coffee we now roast. Ron is not sure as he says I always brew it stronger than his liking. Now I am thinking about adding this roast to our line. It will take awhile but it will be fun thinking it through. Next I am going to try the air roasting to a darker flavor and then a lighter flavor. Hey, all that experience in wine tasting is finally paying off.