Australian Coffee Centre

<Rémi>

We visited a coffee plantation.  Unfortunately, Mum lost the photos so she had to get some similar ones from the internet.

Skybury is a coffee plantation West of Cairns at Mareeba.  This area produces 60% of Australia’s coffee.

At the plantation, they not only grow coffee but also bananas and papayas.

This is a banana flower – it looks like the start of little bananas. 





The banana flowers have big red petals – about as big as my arm and bright red just like my clothes! 

 At the coffee plantation, they grow Arabica coffee in two varieties - yellow and red.

 

<Asha>

I didn’t taste the berries, but Mum and Rémi tasted them.

<Rémi> The berries tasted nothing like coffee.  They were actually quite sweet.  The coffee bean is the seed inside the berry. 

<Rémi> 

The coffee trees in this area are irrigated by open irrigation channels like the one below from Lake Tinaroo, in the Atherton Tablelands. There are 300km of irrigation channels from Lake Tinaroo in this area.

Lake Tinaroo was made specifically to irrigate tobacco plants (tobacco is used to make cigarettes) in this area.  Most of the tobacco plants have been replaced by coffee plantations.

Harvesting - The coffee berries take 9 months to mature and then they are harvested.

This is the type of harvester that is used.

 

 

 

It works by shaking the trees and combing the berries off the branches. 

The berries are then taken in a little bucket conveyor up to a bin.

Processing - To convert the berries to coffee, the first step in the process is to float the berries in water.  All the ripe berries sink and the floaties are discarded.

The berries are then fermented to give the coffee its aroma as well as helping  to remove the pulp, leaving just the bean.

The beans are then slow dried for 36 hours to replicate a sun dried bean.

Then the beans are bashed together to remove the husks.

The beans are then vibrated on an angled table to do the final sorting of good from bad.

The final defective beans are removed by teams of people hand picking them off a conveyor.

 

Roasting – the process of turning green beans into the coffee beans that we can buy in shops.

The green coffee beans expand during roasting as well as changing colour.  They almost double in size. 

 

The beans are roasted in a drum roaster for between 3 and 30 minutes.  The names light, medium or dark roast are determined by the length of roasting time.  Longer roasting = darker colour.

The coffee producers say that coffee is best drunk “off the roast” (soon after roasting) as this is when it has the most flavour.  We tasted coffee off the roast.  It is tasted at room temperature by slurping off a spoon.  It tastes worse than a latte!

<Asha>

I liked the M (Medium) .  I really like coffee but the dark one was a bit yukko!

<Rémi>

I enjoyed the tour, but not the coffee.  Mum & Asha liked both!