Coffee Fundamentals

Time for part 2 of our #coffeefundamentals posts!

The best quality coffees in the world are hand-picked, as it is the only harvesting method that discriminates between ripe and unripe cherry selection. Coffee cherries never ripen uniformly on the tree, making selective hand-picking a labour intensive practice, where pickers make multiple passes roughly every 8-10 days during harvest season. The cost of hand-picking coffee has become a problem, especially in rapidly developing countries where farm labour is expensive or there are a lack of workers willing to hand-pick. Farms in Central America have started to employ itinerant workers, especially from Nicaragua where the economy is currently weaker than its Central Amercian counterparts.

 

In Brazil, the topography and scale of production allows for and requires machine harvesting as it is more efficient. The machine passes along aisles of coffee trees, shaking them to remove both ripe and underripe cherries simultaneously. This approach requires extra sorting to separate cherries of different maturation after picking, along with any debris, such as twigs or leaves, that are also shaken from the trees.

 

Strip picking – whereby all the cherries are stripped from the tree by hand in one movement – is also favoured in origins where quality of production is either less incentivized or machine harvesting is not possible. This results in a mixed collection of cherries that require additional floating and sorting, which is again mostly done by hand. This method is largely used in regions and origins where coffee provides essential income for farmers and their families and selective picking is outweighed by the need for immediate cash and the lack of financial incentive to pick selectively and separate the cherries.

Taken from a post by Falcon Coffees. Great site!