Traveling Man Joe: 2019

The coffee your drank this morning is rarely shipped as the roasted bean from Africa or Asia. Rather, after a lengthy process of hand picking, sorting, washing, fermenting, and then drying those beans you drank were likely hand sorted for a second time by a team of women and then finally shipped to your home country where they were roasted.

What were they sorting out? Well the stuff you see above. Rotten and hallow beans.

From there the "good" beans are placed in white sacks. This is what the likes of anyone from Starbucks to your local roaster purchase to then roast in the west. (The orange is not part of the process, it was this ladies snack while sorting beans.)

Having visited a number of commodity factories, the amount of manual labor involved with green coffee bean production truly amazed me.

Without the magic ingredient, C8H10N4O2, there wouldn't be all this fuse deep in the mountains of Java.

Java, Indonesia