A must visit for coffee lovers! We traveled to the "Nakayama Coffee Plantation" to witness coffee beans being harvested in Okinawa, roasted, and made into drip coffee!

Hello everyone! It’s Goma from the Okinawa Holiday Hackers!

This may seem out of the blue, but can you guess what we are about to do? |ω・)

▼Hint (The title makes it obvious…)

That’s right! Today we are at the “Nakayama Coffee Plantation,” located in the mountains in Yanbaru, Okinawa, one of the few coffee belts in Japan (a zone where coffee beans can be produced) to harvest coffee fruit, and pour our love into it until it becomes a cup of coffee! (=ﾟωﾟ)ﾉ

Harvesting Okinawan coffee beans

We begin by harvesting the coffee fruit.

In order to drink one cup of coffee, we needed to collect over a cup’s worth of countless dark red coffee fruits. We gave it our all!

15 minutes to collect all this! (Lol)

At this time, we were unaware of the long road ahead before we could get our cup of coffee…

▼Collecting even more fruits led to this discovery!

We were told that “They taste sweet,” so we put them in our mouth, and the seed that came out from all that sweetness had us exclaiming in surprise: “This is it! This is a coffee bean!” (; ･`д･´)

We finished harvesting without much trouble, and left the Yanbaru scenery behind to begin the work of extracting the beans from the seeds. (^o^)/

Working around nature feels great, especially when you’re surrounded by the chirping of the birds.

It will go by fast.
Enjoy a GIF that changes every 2.5 seconds of us mindlessly working for 30 minutes. (*‘∀‘)

While appreciating the hard work that goes into making a cup of coffee, we still found time to have fun.

The process we sped up into a 20 second gif for you is finally coming to its climax! (; ･`д･´)

After stripping the parchment (the skin of the coffee bean) with a rice polisher, we put just the coffee beans in the handy roaster.

Roasting to make our own original coffee

This is the most important step where the coffee’s unique traits are determined through roasting.

Did you know that coffee beans are this color before roasting?

Putting aside our shock about the color, the process of roasting is also very fun! As we roast, the beans make a pleasant popping noise and exude a nice smell!

After around 15 minutes of conversing with the beans which we rotated carefully on top of the stove, they finally take their recognizable form!

The amount of roasting to do was chosen by me, so this coffee is my very own! Exciting!
On a side note, I was having so much fun that I ended up roasting them all the way (a french roast)… (;・∀・)

All that’s left is using a hand mill to grind the coffee beans, but we were distracted by the sweet fragrance given off by the fruit we collected.

Being able to experience making coffee by harvesting it in Japan is really something special!

Won’t you also come down to the mountains in Yanbaru to enjoy the process of harvesting Okinawan coffee beans to make your own personal coffee?

Nakayama Coffee Plantation