DavidoffHarvestingThe harvesting of the ripened coffee fruits is mainly carried out according to the picking or stripping method. The picking method consists of manually picking only perfectly ripened fruits while yellow and green ones remain on the branches to ripe to perfection. Since only ripened coffee beans can unfold their specific aroma during the roasting process to the outmost, this method guarantees the best results and is therefore mostly used to generate high quality coffees. The stripping method comprises only one harvesting interval: an average ripening point has to be defined at which all fruits are torn from the branches. Unripe fruits are manually sorted out after the process. In some very great plantations a third harvesting method is applied: the mechanical picking. A machine shakes the plants so that the most ripened fruits fall down. However, since this method is rather damaging to the plants and additionally requires rows that are quite distanced from each other, it is not widely used. To process the coffee fruits, the coffee beans have to be separated from the pulp at first, using one of two possible approaches: dry or humid processing. During the dry process the coffee fruits are either dried by the sun or by a mechanical drier. The fruits are afterwards winnowed; remaining parts of the pulp are taken off and then sieved again. This process allows all the impurities to be separated from the coffee beans. The humid procedure is more expensive than the dry variant but also more prestigious. It uses flowing channels where the fruits are dragged and sieved in order to remove their shells before putting them in fermentation stacks where their coatings are taken off by means of repeated washings. The extracted beans are dried by the sun or artificially and freed from the last remaining pulp particles. |