Munali Coffee

Munali coffee beans

For fun, for quality time, and for family outings Dad and Mom hauled my eight sibs and I all over Michigan visiting museums, touring factories, and meeting people who make history come alive.

As an adult, I now travel the world with a love of learning “how stuff works.” I want to tour Spar’s bakery and ask how many tons of flour they use in a day and how many loaves of bread they could bake in 3 hours. When I heard about the local woman who makes peanut butter, I wanted to go see the process. And when I drove past the Munali Coffee Farm on the way to Lusaka, I dreamed of stopping in for a tour, because I’ve never seen coffee plants and don’t know how coffee is grown and processed.

So, a few weeks back Sara and I stopped at the Munali gate along the road to Lusaka. And I asked if we could take a tour. The guard said I’d need to call ahead to arrange it, and he didn’t have a contact number me to use.

Next time I was in Wonderbake, I asked my friend Geoffrey for a contact number, and jotted one down from the back of a coffee bag.

I called the number (the head office in Lusaka) and was given another number for someone at the farm.

Mr. Mugala said we could arrange a tour in exchange for a mandatory donation to the community school.

So, I did.

I wish we would have had all day to explore the Munali Farm, and I wish my parents and sibs could have been there too.

We drove Amos up and down and around grain fields, coffee plants, and… rows and rows of gorgeous flowers.

 

the bushes in rows reminded me of blueberries

lovely view

massive hoppers for the raw berries

learning how the "popper" works

sort of like a cotton gin

another popper

our guide, Artificial (yes, that is his name)

fermenting tanks

washing lanes

drying screens

more drying

feeling the partially dried beans

Sara asked this woman for permission to take a photo--
her job is to turn coffee beans every hour or two

the raw beans reminded me of cranberries in size, shape, and color

the harvesting overseer in the striped shirt

visiting the Munali plant nursery

coffee plants at the nursery
It takes months for a coffee seed to germinate

A few fun facts from our field trip:

• Munali partners with Inreligentcia and exports coffee beans to the US
• Currently, there are over 60 hectares of coffee plants on the Munali farm
• Coffee beans, when ripe, look very similar to cranberries
• The farm employs around 800 workers (that includes all workers—for the coffee, wheat, soy beans, and nursery)

GORGEOUS flowers-- grown for export to Europe

massive warehouse for sorting coffee beans and prepping them for shipment

green beans (before being roasted)

the sorting machine

bean samples

hurrah for Zambian coffee!

the roasting machines for Munali coffee that is marketed in Zambia

hand sorting beans

what a fun adventure!