Kahlúa Part II: Coffee Roasting/Making- 02.11.11
A continuation of Kahlúa Bean to Bottle Part I, where you saw how coffee comes from the plants in the field to be dried in their green state… next stop was Mexico City where we visited the Pernod Ricard factory where all Kahlúa for the world begins. This time it was insane to see how you make huge VATS of coffee from all those beans! From the huge bags of Green Coffee that has been aged a few months, to being roasted perfectly en masses, then ground, then cold pressed into enormous vats of espresso! Ready to see some of the large machinery up close? On to the next page!
HUGE bags of green coffee arrive in the warehouse…
In to machine one they go… where they are sent on…
To the Tostador del Cafe!
Here are two little videos of the Tostador in action!
And a video close up!
After roasting, he takes a sample…
… and we taste!
Inside their lab there are samples of the colors of the beans after various minutes of roasting…
Next step - grinding!
To test the ground batches for a precise level, they take core samples out…
… couldn’t resist peeking right into the machine!
After being mixed with water in large vats to form espresso like coffee… the final stage is running it through the Separador de Cafe for one more pass to pull out any bubbles/etc…
Here’s what remains in the separador… i must admit the whole sterile warehouse smelled divine!
From here all the coffee is ready to go mix with the sugar syrup and rum in another facility before bottling…
The process is great isn’t it? I wonder what it was like to be the first person ever to take a sip of the great coffee. Watching this really makes you appreciative of all of the coffee we have available to us. I’m trying to start a coffee blog and this inspires me!
----- Doug 17.03.12 00:13