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I am leaving on a jet plane….

Okay and now I am back again

Why is it that the week you go on vacation ends up feeling like only a weekend? Perhaps this is a overstated sentiment, but still that is what our (the girlfriend and I) whirlwind week in Maui felt like. It seemed like as soon as we jumped in our rented mustang convertible and headed off to Lahaina, we had to turn right back around and drive it back to the airport  to get on the plane and go back to Oaktown and back to work.

If it wasn’t for the 300+ pictures, the suitcase full of coconut bras and grass skirts and the depleted checking account, I could swear that we were hardly there at all. Okay,while I am spending most of this blog bitching about how short vacations seem, I must admit that we had a whole lot of fun on the Valley Isle. We created a lot of nice memories, got some tanning in and even dipped our toes ( and rear ends) in the warm ocean water.

For those who have never been to Maui, there is a whole lot fun stuff to do than just sitting around and baking in the sunshine. The road to Hana was an adventure, Iao point was inspirational, The Eco adventure Zip line was a rush, as was Ufo Parasailing, even the full body massage from Zensations was worth it, oh and I cannot forget the magnificent luau at the Hyatt Regency that featured a kick ass fire dancer . But of course, for me, the highlight of the trip happened to be our visit to not one but two actual coffee plantations.

Maui Grown Coffee…

Okay, so everybody knows about Kona coffee that is grown over there on the big island of Hawaii and how smooth (and expensive) it is. Maui, however,  has been  gaining  a reputation for producing some pretty good coffee in its own right. While the coffee farms tend to be at a slightly lower elevation than the big island, the coffee itself is nice and earthy and above all much more affordable then the primo Kona stuff.

Another nice thing about Maui grown coffee, is that there happens to be a large coffee plantation that you can visit right across the street from the famous Kaanapali Beach.Suffice it to say that I was tickled absolutely pink when the nice guy at the Maui Grown Coffee Company (a store located by the smokestack in Lahaina) told me that I could actually just drive up there and take a up close and personal gander at actual coffee being grown

We had just come back from a tour of the Maui Tropical Plantation which also featured coffee but only got to see it fleetingly as we rode through on a little tram. So I was actually salivating at the idea of being able to walk through fields of coffee plants with ripe and ready cherries dangling before my eyes.

Okay, I am pretty sure that we were probably supposed to view the fields from the “viewing platforms” but I could not resist walking through the fields themselves and getting all up close and personal with the plants (just take a right at the little red truck).  My uber patient girlfriend also obliged me on this and even took a large number of great pics of the plants like the one posted above.

I felt like I was in heaven and wished I could just move right into one of the luxury homes that they were building on he property, but unfortunately we did not have 2 million conalis in out bank account having spent it all of coconut bras.

The nice guy at the Maui grown coffee company store was also more than obliging to show me the whole coffee growing, picking, separating, hulling, and processing process that their coffee went through and was also more than happy to sell me a big ol’ 10 lb bag of certified Red Catui green coffee beans that happened to be harvested on this vary same plantation.

The store itself only features one pound bags of the green stuff, but if you ask the guy if he has anything bigger , he will bring you the back where the bigger bags are. He also informed me that they actually have a annex in the port of Oakland where I can go pick up bigger bags (hundred pounders and such) of the stuff if I was so inclined to do so. After sampling a few different varieties there, I decided that the best choice would be the Red Catui which had a very appealing  taste and aroma. Maui Grown Coffee Company’s best known varietal is the Maui Mokka, but I wanted something that I could actualyl roast in my Behmor without too much trouble, and the Red Catui also seemed to taste a bit better.

Anyways, I will save that review for later

Aloha and Mahalo baby.

Here is a batch of the Rwandan Gkongoro Nyarusiza (or however the heck you spell it) that I roasted then immediately sealed into a Foodsaver Freeze and Steam bag.

I got a bunch of these bags on sale at Target a few weeks ago, They were half priced and I just could not pass them up. The thing about these bags is that they have little one way notches in them that are meant to release the steam when you decide to nuke a bag of vegetables.

Seeing these little steam valves on the bag kind of reminded me of the one way CO2 valves that come on many coffee bags. I figured that these bags might work the same way so set up a little experiment in order to find out.

For those who read this blog with some sort of regularity (it’s good to be regular) you now that I have experimented with saving freshly roasted coffee in food saver bags in the past only to find out that if I do not wait at least a day before sucking and sealing, the bag ends up blowing up like a balloon from the CO2 that is released after the beans sit a while.  Well this is really fun to look at and might make a great emergency pillow, I do not think its the ideal way to store freshly roasted coffee.

So anyway, i roasted up a batch of my new favorite beans then immediately stored them in the freeze and steam bag (which ironically I do not plan to freeze or steam) and then let it sit overnight to see if the  bag would either inflate or become slack like a spent balloon.

The next day I was happy to discover that the bag has the same han solo frozen in carbonite consistency as it had the morning before. This means either the one way steam release valves actually do work like a degassing valve or that the RGN does not give off a lot of CO2.

Anyways, I guess I need to do a little more experimenting to find out but I figured I would let the rest of your roasters out there know that this might be a viable storing option.

Or, I guess you could just invest in some coffee bags with degassing valves.

But if you like to play star wars. It is a pretty fun idea.

I got some nice 8 oz degassing bags from the Green Coffee Buying Club  last month. Here is a a batch of Tanzanian Blackburn Estate AA resting in one after being roasted. This batch was sort of an experiment with my Behmor in which I Roasted 13 ounces on the 16 oz (thats 1 elbow to you slines*) setting. I roasted it on P3 for about 19 minutes. I heard the first crack 17:30 into the roast and the second crack came 30 seconds into the cool cycle.

Now you may ask why I did this. Especially with the remainder of the beans that I have been raving about for the past year. Why would I waste the last of my precious batch one  a foray into the unknown. Well, to tell you the truth, I have no idea why I did it. I just felt the need to fill the bag.  A compulsion that came to me last week.

It all started with the Mogiana…

The  Brazilian Dry Process Mogiana to be precise. This bean turned out a real kick in the head (in a good way) and I had decided that I wanted to share this with one of sibs who happens to be addicted to coffee almost as bad as I am.

I wanted to give her a bag of this stuff. But I did not what to give her a bag that looked half full, which my new bags look when I roast up  only 8 oz.   I thought that this would look kinda tacky, so I decided to fix the problem by going for whole LB of the Mogiana (she loved the name btw). This gave me a whole bunch of beans, enough to fill the bag plus have a little left over for me.

This however then gave me the idea of always making enough to fill my new bags. Xmas is coming up after all and I do not want to be sending out tacky looking gift bags that look half full. So, the experimentation has begun.

Roasting 12 to 10 oz’s on the pound setting also gives me the benefit of hitting a darker roast that I can never get to before the cooling cycle in the Behmor hits. And now that I know a little bit more about the curves,I am pretty sure I can handle it.

Of course, I have been keeping a close eye on it to make sure no fire starts.