A childhood memory
My uncle's coffee machine
Before I knew coffee as a drink, I knew it as a machine. My uncle built a hand-cranked coffee depulper, a despulpadora: two wooden rollers set in a frame, turned by a wheel. The coffee was poured in at the top. As the wheel turned, the rollers stripped off the skins, and the beans dropped into a bath of water. The skins took a different route, down a long slide and into a pit.
That slide is what I remember most. I spent hours watching it, imagining what it would feel like to ride it to the bottom. I knew it wasn't safe, so I only watched.
His machines even made it into a newspaper article about our corner of Yojoa.
