This Is The Roaster...This Is Destoner...
It may seem a bit weird, but I enjoy sifting throught the bits of stuff among the roasted coffee beans that don't get sucked up into the destoner hopper on the roaster I work on. Instead, the heavier matter remains on a hinged gate and eventually gets dumped into a shallow metal tray below.
Bits of glass and quartz; sometimes small pieces of bone, which have been almost polished smooth by heat and a few minutes tumbling around inside a drum with a hundred thirty or so pounds of coffee beans; the occasional rivet, spring, nail...all of them travelling from some faroff country...from some estate farm...a button from a shirt or a coin from a pocket...
Chili beans and corn. Seeds from a piece of fruit...all of it coming from someplace that isn't here, and unless we're extremely fortunate to have travelled afar-from someplace that both culturally and geographically exists for us only in books and magazines and in our own imaginations.
What I pick out of that tray puts a personality of sorts on the finished product now waiting for its final journey into a cup in some shop in some town or city in Minnesota.
Someone lost that button off his shirt perhaps-on some farm in Colombia, or Guatemala...some girl who's never even been off the island she grew up on dropped the seeds from her fruit on a hot summer day during the season's harvest in Sumatra, or lost a bead off her necklace in Ethiopia...
Then again, they sometimes dry the harvested green beans on huge concrete slabs and turn them with rakes-or in some countries, they dry the beans right on the side of the road...the jetasm I find then being the tiny bits of gravel and glass that falls through the holes in the cooling tray and transition to the destoner.
There is a circle that is completed in a way when I remove that debris from the remainder of the beans in the tray and toss it into the small cardboard box that sits on top of the destoner-joining the other bits and pieces of other people's lives, or other people's countries, or other people's meals...
I suppose if anything at all, I am humbled in a way knowing that I am one of only a very few who get to see that "face." By the time the coffee makes its way into a bag, coffee shop, or kitchen coffee maker, that image disappears into the steamy vapor of a freshly brewed cup.
enjoy.
Bits of glass and quartz; sometimes small pieces of bone, which have been almost polished smooth by heat and a few minutes tumbling around inside a drum with a hundred thirty or so pounds of coffee beans; the occasional rivet, spring, nail...all of them travelling from some faroff country...from some estate farm...a button from a shirt or a coin from a pocket...
Chili beans and corn. Seeds from a piece of fruit...all of it coming from someplace that isn't here, and unless we're extremely fortunate to have travelled afar-from someplace that both culturally and geographically exists for us only in books and magazines and in our own imaginations.
What I pick out of that tray puts a personality of sorts on the finished product now waiting for its final journey into a cup in some shop in some town or city in Minnesota.
Someone lost that button off his shirt perhaps-on some farm in Colombia, or Guatemala...some girl who's never even been off the island she grew up on dropped the seeds from her fruit on a hot summer day during the season's harvest in Sumatra, or lost a bead off her necklace in Ethiopia...
Then again, they sometimes dry the harvested green beans on huge concrete slabs and turn them with rakes-or in some countries, they dry the beans right on the side of the road...the jetasm I find then being the tiny bits of gravel and glass that falls through the holes in the cooling tray and transition to the destoner.
There is a circle that is completed in a way when I remove that debris from the remainder of the beans in the tray and toss it into the small cardboard box that sits on top of the destoner-joining the other bits and pieces of other people's lives, or other people's countries, or other people's meals...
I suppose if anything at all, I am humbled in a way knowing that I am one of only a very few who get to see that "face." By the time the coffee makes its way into a bag, coffee shop, or kitchen coffee maker, that image disappears into the steamy vapor of a freshly brewed cup.
enjoy.
posted by in.dog.neato at 7:31 PM
3 comments
