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Bertrand hand-picks them as they redden and squeezes out the two, sometimes three, green beans inside the sweet fruit surrounding them.
“They taste just like a cherry, it’s just the pits are larger,” he said.
He’s been drying them on the warm top of the coffee brewer in his shop, to try to approximate the warmth of the sun of the tropical countries where they’re normally grown. Once they’re all harvested and dried, Bertrand will have them roasted by his coffee supplier, JJ Bean, and will brew “probably a pot of coffee.”
“I don’t think I’ll even get a half-pound (of roasted coffee beans),” he said. And he doesn’t know what to expect in terms of flavour. “I don’t even know the genus.”
West Coast Gardens in Surrey advertises a four-inch coffee plant, the Coffea Arabica, considered a tropical (although it had none in stock recently). It suggests keeping the plant from freezing and notes it won’t do well if it’s kept in temperatures consistently below 18 C.
The tropical trees like to grow on hilly ground, in the shade with natural mists, cloud cover and protection from wind, said Kicking Horse Coffee of Invermere on its website.
Considered evergreens, coffee plants can grow to over six-metres tall unless pruned. Each tree produces one-half to one full kilogram of cherries or about 2,000-to-4,000 cherries. Harvesters hand-pick between 100 and 400 cherries a day. It would take about 2.5 kilograms of coffee beans to create a half-kilogram of coffee.
“In one year, a two-cup-a-day drinker of coffee will consume the annual harvest of 18 coffee trees,” said Kicking Horse.
Bertrand hopes to finish harvesting his cherries over the next few weeks, as they ripen, and will be interested to see if the blossoms return in the spring.
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