CROP TO CUP

Harvesting Coffee

Harvesting Coffee cherries often ripen at different times on the same tree. One branch can simultaneously hold blossoms, green fruit, half ripe berries, and rosy red cherries. On most farms, the fruit of the coffee plant is plucked by hand, just as has been done since time immemorial. Pickers typically visit each tree three or four times in a season, picking only the ripe beans and leaving the green beans to be harvested at a later time. On large modernized farms a harvesting machine is used to strip the tree of its fruit. Although these machines leave the coffee plant intact, they remove all the loose cherries, both those that are ready for roasting and those that are not yet ripe.

Extracting the Beans

Coffee beans are encased in five different layers. The outer skin that holds it altogether, next, there's a slick sticky layer, called mucilage for obvious reasons which coats a tough paper-thin layer know as parchment. The final very thin layer is the silverskin, which clings to the beans. It is not easy to release the beans from there five layered coating. There are two methods of performing this feat. The 'washed coffee method' and the 'Dry Coffee method'.

Processing Coffee Beans

Before the beans become a steaming cup of coffee, they must be extracted from the coffee cherries. Then hey must be roasted, and in some cases decaffeinated.