Believe it or not, St. John grows great coffee. This is first hand information. Habiba and I picked coffee cherries from some of John Gibney's coffee trees, which were in full bloom and, which he said gave two crops a year.

Picking Coffee

The red, ripe cherries should be picked one at a time. If they're too high on the tree, you can pull on a branch and bend the top of the tree down enough so that you can reach the higher branches. You'll need to do this carefully so as not to break the tree.

Coffee Cherries

Picking the cherries took some time because you need a lot of beans just to make even a single cup of coffee.

I learned from John that you can eat the cherries. They're mildly sweet and have a pleasant flavor. They do contain some caffeine, but not nearly as much as can be found in the bean. John also told me that the cherry makes a delicious drink that is popular in Latin America.)

Next, we took the cherries home and squeezed out the beans. There are two beans in each cherry. You just squeeze the cherry and the beans pop out. At this point they are slimy from the juice of the cherry.

Once you get the beans out of the fresh cherries, you add some water and let them sit for a few hours until they ferment.

Fresh Coffee Beans

Fermenting Coffee Beans

Washed Beans

Green Beans

Then you wash them and put them in the sun until they're good and dry.

Once they're dry, you need to remove the husk. This is done commercially using a machine. The first such device was invented by Julio Smout in 1800. Lacking this you can use a mortar and pestle or, if you don't have a real lot of beans, by simply peeling off the husk bean by bean.

Roasted Beans

Once you get the husk off, you have what are known as green beans

The next step is to roast the beans, which we did slowly in a dry frying pan, until the beans turned a rich dark brown. During the process the room filled with the unmistakable aroma of roasting coffee.

Good Coffee

Next, we brought the beans over by John and Teri, ground them up and Teri brewed up a batch, which we all sampled.

John, Teri, Habiba and I are all coffee connoisseurs and our unanimous verdict was that St. John coffee is excellent tasting and very strong - it gives you quite a buzz, so it must have a high caffeine content.

It takes a lot of work to make a cup of coffee, but it's worth it.