Is it Coffee Yet? Part One

We take it for granted as we sip our cups of coffee, but there is actually a long process to get from seed to cup. It's easy to say the farmer grows and harvests the coffee, then someone buys it, and it gets roasted and sold to you in some form. It's just a bit more than that. the next few posts will serve as a primer/reminder on how coffee becomes coffee. Today I talk about the first three steps.

1) Planting - Coffee is originally Coffee Cherry seeds. Ironically, it's the seed which can be processed and roasted to become a cup of coffee, or it can be developed as a seed to plant and cultivate more coffee.

2) Harvesting - You don't just plant a seed, and boom - COFFEE! It can take 3-4 years for the coffee plants to be mature and ready to harvest. In the time the farmer is caring and making sure all goes with the cultivation of the plants. Harvesting is a labor intensive process. Pickers grow through very narrow rows of trees, in highly mountainous areas, looking for ripe cherries to pick.

There are two ways to pick cherries: a) strip picked, where all the cherries are taken, and the riper ones can be selected later, or b) selectively picked, where only the ripe cherries are being picked. It's the latter which is more labor intensive, and usually done by hand. The former could be done by machine.

3) Processing the Cherries - There are two ways to process coffee cherries. The first is the dry method. Cherries are laid out in the sun, and are periodically raked and turned over to prevent spoilage. This reduces the moisture content to 10% or 11%.

With the wet method, the pulp is removed from the cherries and the beans are dried wit ha bit of parchment still on them. The beans go through a machine which removes the pulp, the lighter beans float to the top of the machine, while the heavier ones are below. They next get separated by size. From there, they are put in large fermentation tanks. In these tanks the parchment is naturally removed. This can take between 12-48 hours.

Next - drying and milling.

Charlie