Have you ever seen the rain?

Have you ever seen the rain? Will it ever stop? Will this blog ever be written with any regularity?

Welcome to rainy season in Mbale.  Currently it’s blowing what feels like a force 10 outside and power is out as the rain is coming audibly closer. In other words, perfect conditions. This milieu brings forth the peak of the harvest season, with over nine tonnes of coffee being purchased yesterday between our seven buying sites across the mountain. This is of course great news, as a coffee company needs to buy coffee to operate. It also needs to dry this coffee, which is where the fun really begins.

Where does it all go? Is there any space left on the drying racks? Do phrases like ‘drying capacity’ haunt our dreams?

A common misconception is that drying coffee is a completely inert, linear process, like boiling water. It starts in one state, you leave it for a bit, and then it’s done. This couldn’t be further from the truth, as the drying process is just as complex and demanding as any other stage in the coffee chain. You dry too fast and too hot, you risk denaturing all of the flavour compounds you’ve worked so hard to imbue into the coffee. Too slow and wet, and your coffee becomes host to some undesired mould. So drying coffee feels more like trying to tightrope walk, while being beaten with sticks.

We’ve got drying beds and greenhouses in a number of different places from the mountain top to the plains, and coffee at different stages of dryness being trucked between them to wherever it can find a home. Every morning begins with phone calls and triage, hunting down empty racks like they’re made of gold to receive the coffee fresh out of the fermentation tanks.

That’s all overly melodramatic but hopefully gives some conception of the day to day here in the harvest season. To end on a positive note, volumes have definitely picked up after a slow start, and the samples reaching the cupping table are revealing some really exciting stuff- provided it stays dry!