"Mr Coffee" is a Dutch coffee loving national who quit the stock market to travel to the tropics in search of good coffee - or so his story goes. He married a Lao girl whose family have a long history of coffee growing in Paksong on the Bolaven plateau just east of Pakse.
We started off tasting home grown, hand picked, wok roasted "robusta" coffee - we both thought "here we go, we'll be off the wall for the rest of the day, highly twitchy and extremely irritable", there was no way we could do the tour without the tasting. I love the smell of coffee, smelling it would probably have been enough but the taste was quite something else, I've never tasted such a smooth, creamy and "sweet" tasting brew - delicious.... Yes, for those of you who know me well I haven't touched coffee for about 8 years ... waited all day long for the after effect especially as we had to taste Coffee's Arabica blend too - nothing came for me, Mr W claimed to have been twitching but that's debatable... a very well spent couple of hours for both of us!
Some facts about coffee
Coffee grows between 20 degrees north and 20 degrees south i.e. In the tropics
Robusta grows between 600 metres and 1200 metres altitude
Arabica grows between 1200 metres and 1800 metres altitude
Both varieties grow in volcanic soil
Coffee is harvested between October and December
Laos produces 90,000 tonnes of coffee a year
Arabica coffee bushes are almost Xmas tree shaped
Robusta coffee bushes are tall and lanky!
Mr Coffee Wok Roasting Coffee
Cooling roasted coffee
Arabica coffee plants
Begin forwarded message:
From: Fiona Wells <wellsfiona@gmail.com>
Date: 11 April 2011 15:14:03 GMT+08:00
To: Fiona Wells <wellsfiona@gmail.com>
Subject: Arabica
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