If you’ve been with us all year (and what a year it has been), you’ll know that our first funded project was in Brazil, working with the Women in Coffee, if you haven’t already, you should checkout our first blog.
]]>
If you’ve been with us all year (and what a year it has been), you’ll know that our first funded project was in Brazil, working with the Women in Coffee, if you haven’t already, you should checkout our first blog.
Mataõ, women in coffee
Officially founded by 12 women of the community, the Mataõ women in coffee group has since grown to 24, all of whom are 3rd and 4th generation coffee farmers, all seeking some independence from a what has traditionally been a very patriarchal society.
Working together in their close-knit society, these women control everything from harvesting, processing and even selling of their specialty coffee products.
Strength in numbers
Close neighbours, friends, and cousins Maria and Venessa are the recipients of the first two Sourced drying beds, taking the total within the community total to 7, with a goal to reach a total of 24
This does not just impact Maria and Venessa, the community work together to help each other with the workload and pooling together for communal infrastructure like their wet and dry mills. In Addition to the 7 beds, by working together, the Mataõ Women in coffee have already funded a local wet mill.
All of their hard work and planning is starting to pay off, with them taking out a number of coffee producing awards over the last few years, which is incredible when you consider that many of these ladies hadn’t even had a chance to taste their coffee, even a few years ago.
The Project
Materials are prepared, utilizing sustainably using timer from the surrounding land.
The team meet to plan out the construction.
The upright support posts are cemented into the foundation.
The external frame takes shape.
The horizontal supports are constructed, ready to support the beds.
A black mesh material is used for air flow, and to capture as much of the suns energery as possible.
The mesh is fitted tightly, to ensure there are now dips or sags for moisture to gather.
Now that the beds are ready, they can finaly be used to dry their first batch of coffee.
Now that the frames are complete, the covers are fixed into place to protect the coffee from the heavy rains of the wet season.
What is next?
Well, we’re well on our way to funding two more beds, as of today we have over 2/3rds of the funds needed already raised, and every time you purchase one of our products, you are directly helping us get to the next goal.
When we hit this goal, we’re going to build another two beds, at two more farms.
But we’re not finished there, we also plan to support the Mataõ Women in Coffee project with the funding of a coffee roaster, allowing them to produce their coffee for wholesale locally!
To keep updated, join our mailing list for the most up to date information!
Coffee Beans. It’s a bean, right?
While it makes sense on face value, many consumers haven’t thought any further than this over their morning brew.
Now, if you know already the differences between a pulped natural and a black honey process, then this article isn’t for you. If you want more in-depth technical information we love the work that the Coffee Quality Institute do, check them out!
I’m going to be keeping this simple today and just outline the basics of where coffee starts.
Where coffee comes from.
Spoiler alert! Coffee beans come from a fruit. Or more specifically, it’s the seed of a certain kind of cherry, that grows on varieties of the coffea plant. In this family are a number of sub-families, the major two being Robusta and Arabica, which both have countless varieties that are all subtly different.
Think of all the different varieties of apples you know, and how different they can taste, then compare them to the varieties of pears that you have tasted. (Fun fact, both are part of the pome fruit family.)
From there the similarities to apples and pears become less, as coffee does not necessarily grow in neat little orchards, but often in diverse mountainous forest areas, surrounded by larger trees and other crops. Coffee trees grow best in tropical regions, with major producing areas in South America, Africa and Asia.
Harvesting
It can take 3 - 4 years for coffee trees to mature enough to have a sellable crop. It can take roughly 10 weeks to harvest a crop, and then another 9 months of waiting (and hoping for good weather) until the next harvest. Not to say that the farmers are on holiday for 9 months of the year, an awful lot goes into maintaining a farm in optimal condition during the off-season, but the harvest is when a lot of the hard work is done.
Like most fruit, coffee cherries ripen at different rates, so there will usually be 3 – 4 stages of the picking process, and although machinery is sometimes used on larger farms, more often than not each coffee cherry is picked by hand, and on a steep incline. This is hard work!
Processing/Drying
It’s during the processing phase that the most dramatic impact on the final flavour in the cup happens. Coffee cherries have lots of layers, and most of these layers we don’t want.
Essentially, we want to remove the excess fruit, leaving the “silverskin”. There are dozens of ways of removing all of the excess fruit, but I am going to keep it simple and just talk about the two major methods.
The washed process and the natural process.
Washed process
As the name suggests, this uses lots of water but makes it easier to remove some of the less than tasty cherries that have been harvested, leading to a coffee with a cleaner crisper taste.
Unripe and damaged cherries are screened out
Cherries are loaded into the depulper
The Depulper breaks the skin and removes some of the excess fruit
The cherries are soaked to help remove the remaining sticky fruit
The coffee seeds are now rinsed, leaving a clean coffee, in parchment
The seeds are then dried in the sun, being turned continuously, until they reach 12-14% moisture content
Natural process
This is the other end of the scale, where we skip steps 1-4 in the washed process and lay the cherries still intact, out to dry.
Because the flesh and skin are left intact, more concentrated sugars are absorbed into the seed, leading to bigger, sweeter flavours and can often taste like ripe fruit or even wine in the final product.
The opposite of a washed process, this method requires much less water, however, can come with other challenges. Naturally processed coffees require high levels of sun radiation, and where they are processed in inappropriate climates, defects can arise, causing mould or other off flavours.
There are some ways to avoid this, for instance using mechanical drying equipment, or methods like the raised drying beds that the Sourced family are funding, which you can read more about here!
Dry milling and classification/grading
To protect the coffee before shipment, the seeds are stored in parchment until being sent to the dry mill.
When the coffee is fed through the dry mill, coffee will have its protective parchment layer removed before being graded and classified. The coffee seeds go through multiple levels of sorting before it is ready for shipment. One basic level of objective quality we’re able to apply to coffee is that larger, heavier beans are “better”.
To achieve this coffee beans are first sorted for density which also helps to remove chips and any leftover parchment that may have made it through the mill. The beans are then sent to screens where they are graded for size before finally being sorted for colour done by a very impressive (and expensive) laser sorter where any off colour beans (blacks or faded for example) can be removed. In some countries, this step is still done by hand!
What we’re left with is a small dry seed with a greenish blue colour, this is the raw product ready for export, this is what is known as green coffee, and they are stored piled up in sacks like below.
Buying, Shipping and Roasting.
Lastly, the green coffee is loaded onto a container where it spends 6-8 weeks on a ship before we receive it, roast it and pop it in a bag, all before it gets to you, at the end of the chain!
Now, there is a lot more to how these steps actually work. How we select, buy and roast our coffee is a lengthy and complex process, and deserves its own blog (which will come!)
For now, I will leave you with this simple info-graphic to step you through the process.
If you have any questions or want to know more about any of these steps, ask us a question below!
Sourced Coffee is on a journey to help coffee communities at the source with the mission to improve conditions on farms, reward growers for their hard work and future-proof coffee for consumers.
At Sourced, we believe it’s important to have clarity and transparency around our impact, and we want to bring you, along on the ride. We can only do so much on our own but if we band together the extent of our impact can be expanded significantly. And that’s what we’re all about.
We believe that paying a price that is not only covering production costs but is profitable for a producer, is the bare minimum that coffee roasters can do. The next step is to support community-led initiatives that directly give back to the farm or coffee growing community. We want to give the power back to producers to invest in their farms and continually improve the quality of coffee they produce
We’re about developing genuine relationships, getting to know our producers and working with them to understand their challenges and how we can work together to overcome them. We want coffee producers and their community to thrive and to continue growing amazing coffee that we can all enjoy.
We’re dedicated to giving back, and not just in a dollar amount. We’re going to give the coffee communities we work with, the opportunity to build their own future. We’re doing this by building our Impact Fund, with your help. We will contribute $1 of every whole bean and ground coffee product sold, and $0.50 of every pack of pods sold to our Impact Fund. 100% of the money we raise will go directly to the community project.
We know you want to be a part of something bigger, they want to support companies that genuinely exist to make this world better. We allow you to see the impact your contribution is having on coffee farming communities. Safe in the knowledge that the community has been empowered to decide for itself what it needs.
]]>
This project was formed in 2013 and now comprises 24 female coffee producers from the township of Tomazina in the Norte Pioneiro region of Brazil.
Like many producers in the world, these women had never tasted their own coffee, until recently. The establishment of the Mataõ Women in Coffee Project has enabled them to undertake cupping education programs, learning to identify lots that stand out in quality which in turn allows them to maximise their income.
At Sourced, our Impact Fund will enable these women to build new processing equipment and facilities to increase their coffee quality and production capabilities.
Weather is challenging for producers of crops all around the world, particularly coffee producers. Once a coffee cherry is picked from the tree, there is a limited window for it to be processed and dried to ensure high quality. The women in Mataõ are faced with even more difficultly as their harvest takes place during the wet season. This is great for cherry ripening, but not for drying. When dried on traditional outdoor patios, the coffee is subject to developing defects such as mould and phenolic flavours.
To help protect the producers from the impact of the weather conditions, we have pledged $3,594 to install two new enclosed greenhouses with raised drying beds. The structure will be built in time for the next harvest.
These enclosed drying greenhouses not only protect the precious coffee cherry from moisture, but also allow for more of the sun’s energy to be captured and harboured so that when the external temperature does drop, the internal temperature remains much more consistent. There is also the ability for the humidity to be controlled meaning that perfect drying conditions can be maintained no matter what the weather outside.
Above: Enclosed greenhouse with raised, covered drying beds.
Being able to have consistent drying facilities means that the overall coffee quality will increase, and the women will be able to sell it for a higher price.
Now that we’ve committed to building two, we are on a mission to build more with your help. When our Impact Fund reaches $3,500, we’ll build another two.
This is an incredibly exciting project to be a part of and we look forward to seeing the lives of these women continue to be enriched by the quality of coffee they produce.
]]>