Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Sorting at the Mill


   For the last several weeks I have been living in Bali which is where the mill is located. Bali is situated about 20 km west of Bamenda and is connected by a paved road making the trip to and from quick and painless. Bali is a decent sized village, probably less than 10,000 people but the paved road makes it a pretty bustling place. Also, there are several small colleges and universities in town which keeps the age demographic much more evenly distributed than in my former village (where there were essentially no persons between the ages of 20 and 35). The Fon of Bali is a premiere Fon and he maintains a very impressive palace and works hard to keep the culture of the region active making Bali a very popular stop for tourists to the region.
   Bali is also home to the Bali Area Coffee Cooperative, owners of the mill that Mocha Joe's is currently using to hull and grade our coffee here in Cameroon. The mill is a large warehouse type building housing an industrial sized hulling and grading machine. It isn't the first hulling/grading machine to be installed in the building, but it is a few decades old. The guys who work with the machine are well used to some of its idiosyncrasies and seem to do just fine with it. Outside there are several platforms for drying and covered areas where sorters can work out of the sun and/or rain. Sorters are the people, mostly ladies, who take over the process of selecting the highest quality coffee beans after the machine has performed the initial cleaning and grading. I've tried my own hand at selecting, spending a couple of hours each day picking out black, damaged, over fermented, or insect chewed beans. To put it simply, I'm really slow when it comes to sorting. Sorters are paid per sac (60-kg) after Philip has confirmed that the work has been well done. Grades (A, B, C, D, or T for Arabica coffee) have different standards for what passes such that by the time the highest grade coffees are ready for export they are a very pretty batch of uniform little beans just asking to be roasted. The lower grades, on the other hand, (and I'm not quite sure who will end up drinking these) have a distinctly less pristine character.
    A well experienced person (that is to say, not me) can work through one or two sacs in a day (I would want to set aside about a week) depending on the grade. My impression is that people are happy to have the opportunity to work at sorting as they can take home more cash then they would from a days labor in the farm, the hours are flexible, and the atmosphere among the sorters is pleasantly communal with children being more than welcome and a small meal shared each day.
   As the season for selecting and cleaning wears to an end, I am anxious to travel towards Oku to meet our farmer partners whom I will be working with on the organic certification project.