A View to a Mill

To process coffee is to commit oneself to a lengthy, multi-stage operation over the course of many months. From purchase to pulping, sorting to shad drying it all culminates here, at the mill. Our new home for the next six weeks.

The mill looms large over the season, visible as a vague shadow in the distance much like an end of term exam. And like the exam all your hard work, or lack thereof, is about to be exposed. Yet instead of a school classroom this test takes place in a sweltering warehouse where it snows coffee dust sufficient to make Paul Atredies jealous. With the maw of the milling machine’s hopper a stand-in for Shai-Hulud and Bugisu AA arabica a surrogate for spice, the mill is a great location for a low budget Dune adaptation.  Denis Villeneuve, you know where to find us.

The whir of the machinery rattles around your head long after you’ve left the mill and in combination with the smell from the bakery across the road that imprints itself into your clothes leaves you in no doubt as to where you’ve been that day. Like a cat under a hot tin roof, you spend your days loading coffee into the hopper, as the machine hulls the coffee and grades it by size from C all the way up to AA - just like with batteries, the more AA the better. *  You just hope and pray that what the machine spits out the other end isn’t riddled with insect damage or any other of a number of fun sounding defects, like fungus damage, or full sours. Yummy.

Bad movie references aside, that perhaps paints too bleak an image, as there’s also plenty to enjoy about the mill. Watching heavy machinery at work is always satisfying, and there’s nothing quite as gratifying as seeing bag after bag of clean AA coffee come out of the milling hall. So far this year outturns have been good, the coffee’s looking pretty spotless, and most importantly none of it has gone walking.

There’s still more to come after this- hand sorting all the coffee, bag printing and packaging, and preparing for inspection- but the end is in sight! When you next hear from us our coffee will be on the water, perhaps sailing to a roastery near you. (Or not, we don’t know where you live.)

Until next time…

*We don’t know anything about batteries.