Coffee, from plant to cup

On the branch you can see ripe, some unripe (green) and some overripe cherries (black).
In an ideal world the farmer pics several times and always the ripe cherries. But mostly the cherries are picked together and seperated later.

Stripping is the most common form of harvesting coffee cherries. As the fruits grow directly on the branch they are easily stripped.

For one tree a picker needs 20-30 minutes.
That makes 5-8 kg cherries which end up as 1-2 kg roasted coffee.

...might be quick, but not cheap.
Those machines drive with walking speed and shake the branches with plastic-poles on 2 horizontal axials. Looks like a car wash machine, but poles instead of threads.
With a small conveyor band the cherries are transported into coffeebags at the end of the machine where a man is exchanging the bags after each filling.
This method plucks less leaves then humans when stripping.
But the machine can only be used in a flat territory.

Before the pulping mixed cherries get selected in water channels where the dried ones will float on the surface and are easily seperated.

The unripe and ripe cherries will be squeezed through the pulper, a rotating barrel with 7mm slots. The soft ripe cherries can be pulped/squeezed through the slots and loose their pulp, the hard unripe green cherries roll out on the side again.

The pulped/semi washed seeds/beans are still in the parchment skin and a sticky musilage.
Now the beans can be dried with the musilage, otherwise they will be washed or fully washed by floating them in a water tank for up to 36 hours.
In the water a controlled fermentation of the enzymes is used to get rid of the sticky musilage.

Here you can see the whole cherries drying and being turned the whole day to prevent fermentation which would lead to a REALLY bad taste.
After about 8 days the cherries will still have approx 20% moisture.
They will be dried additionaly in a heated dryer until the moisture is 10-12%.
That's the degree for a safe transportation. More humidity means more weight and more money for the farmer, but the risk would be too high that the whole load gets moldy.
But before that the dried skin, musilage and parchment skin have to be pestled to get to the seeds - the coffee beans.

Same rules as for the drying cherries. Here you can see the pulped coffee beans.
The flesh was pulped off, but the seeds still remain in the parchment skin which is also still covered with sticky muscilage.

to be continued....