Congolese Coffee

One of the things I liked about African life was the coffee. The best arabica beans from the mountainous Kivu region came in one kilogram bags (2.2 pounds). The instructions to keep the coffee in the freezer in the plastic bag was in French, Swahili, English, Lingala, and Arabic. This product rarely found its way to faraway Kinshasa, the capital of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) where I lived.

The rest of the country, and me too, relied on the lowland robusta coffee -- the poor person's morning jolt. Every marketplace sold the watered down stuff, cooked up in huge, open topped pots, liberally sweetened with powered milk and sugar.

I learned the village method to roast the beans. Green beans were heated in a flat pan, with a tiny amount of palm oil added to keep them from burning. They were then pounded into grounds in a wooden mortar and pestle. The coffee produced was earthy, smoky, and rich in flavor.

After returning to the US, I found American coffee to be bland and stale. I now buy green beans off of the Internet and prepare them every few days, in a small household roaster.