Anyone for a cup of coffee?

Ok, so I'm not quite ready to producing my first cup of coffee made from home grown, freshly roasted coffee beans, not even close! But I at least wanted to show you how well the coffee plants I have are doing, and some tips about how you too can maybe one day make Nescafe look like the poor mans coffee that it really is.

Coffea Arabica is the plant where your every day cup of coffee comes from. The process of producing roasted coffee beans from the berries that the plants produce is actually not as straight forward as I was hoping, but where would the fun be if it was meant to be easy!

There is a big debate happening in the coffee growing community about sun versus shade grown coffee. The best coffees in the world are grown in the rainforests high above sea level within 20 degrees of the equator, as the berry that contains the coffee beans ripens slower which develops the intense flavours and aromas that we have come to enjoy. Due to commercialisation and the need for greater profits, farmers soon realised you could grow coffee in direct sun, but the quality of the coffee bean is greatly diminished.

So the dilemma for me was, how do I provide shade to my coffee plants, but also keep it warm enough in winter to keep it alive? Our house is made from brick, and as mentioned previously our house faces 10 degrees north, so the theory is that the bricks will retain some heat in winter and help radiate some of that at night time to the surrounding plants.

So I now have 3 coffee plants, 2 x Coffea Arabica and 1 x Dwarf Catui, all hiding amongst other plants against the front walls of the house. I have a metre tall Flax plant right in front of the house which I've managed to use to provide shade for two of the coffee plants, and here's an example of one:

So let's hope in the next year or so I can finally drink my first cup of home grown roasted coffee!