22 October 2007 by Shifrah Combiths
Before the Pour: How Coffee is Grown and Harvested
How does your morning pick-me-up get to your cup? What happens between the growth of the coffee plant and your sips? Let’s explore the process of coffee-making at the macro level.
Coffee plants often start out interspersed with other crops such as corn or rice for a few years. Other times, as in some places in Colombia, coffee is continually grown amongst naturally occurring vegetation. In Columbia, it’s banana trees. Young plants are often started from seed, emerging from holes into which several seeds have been placed. However, sometimes plants are propagated through budding, cuttings, or even grafting. It takes three to five years for the plant to begin producing, and this only occurs when weather conditions, soil and shade harmonize appropriately.
Once the plant is ready to produce, it yields small white flowers that last little more than a day before they begin to give way to “cherries,” which redden as they ripen. These cherries contain the twin beans that we prize. Sometimes, a cherry produces only one bean, called a peaberry, which is smaller than a regular bean and also contains the potential for more intense flavor. Often discarded in the past, they are now highly prized and garner impressive profits.
Coffee cherries are usually harvested by hand, either from the plant or from the ground, although it can be done by machine. The machine, however, picks all the cherries at once, including the unripened ones, while harvesting by hand allows for several harvests per season.
Following harvest, the beans must be extracted from the cherries. First the flesh of the cherries is removed, usually by machine. However, a filmy residue remains on the beans. It is often removed through fermentation. A microbiological process, fermentation is actually an important phase in the development of coffee’s flavor. After fermentation, the beans must be thoroughly washed.
Alternately, beans may be excised from the cherry through dry processing or semi-washed processing, both of which produce less wastewater than the fully washed processing that’s a component of fermentation. In semi-washed processing, most of the residue left after fermentation is removed mechanically. The remaining residue, stuck in the crevice on the flat surface of the bean, is then removed through washing. Dry processing, which occurs either in the sun or artificially, involves drying the pulp, hulling the cherries, and finally mechanically removing the dried outer layer of the cherry. Although these methods are more environmentally friendly, fully washed processing is considered to produce the best beans.
After harvesting, the beans are roasted. Roasting times vary, producing beans of varied appearance in color and oiliness, which in turn yield different-flavored final brews. During the roasting process, sometimes beans are mixed, and this creates an endless array of special blends.
Next time you quaff your coffee, won’t it be lovely to realize all the elements of soil, sunshine and fermentation that you’re drinking?