How Coffee is Harvest

Coffee has almost a millennium of history. Ethiopia, where coffee originated, is said to have discovered the plant. You have probably heard of Kaldi, the coffee inventor. It has become legendary! Kaldi noticed his goats acting strangely after eating berries from a special plant. This person tried eating berries as an experiment, and guess what? His energy levels increased significantly! This started coffee culture.

Since Ethiopia brought coffee to the Arabian Peninsula, people have grown and traded it. Qahwah homes, or coffee houses, were popular hangouts for merchants, poets, and thinkers. The Ottoman Empire dominance in the Middle East and North Africa was evident in its coffee business. To depict Ottoman life, coffee cafes were important.

Coffee arrived in Europe in the 16th century and became popular. The first European coffee cafe opened in Venice in 1645. This established a trend, and coffee shops sprung up across the continent! As drinking coffee became a prestige symbol, the coffee business became a major economic participant.

Today, coffee is everywhere! It is incredible that over 25 million people worldwide produce it. After petroleum, it is the second most traded commodity worldwide. Over 70 countries grow coffee, with Brazil, Vietnam, and Colombia producing the most.

The coffee plant is a type of flowering plant that belongs to the Rubiaceae family. People grow it a lot for its seeds, which we usually call coffee beans. This plant originally comes from the tropical areas of Africa, but now you can find it growing in different parts of the world, like South America, Central America, and Asia. Did you know that the coffee plant is a big deal for a lot of countries? It really has a huge impact on the global economy!

The Coffea plant is the type of tree that produces coffee. So, when we are talking about coffee production, there are really two main types of Coffea plants that come into play: Coffea arabica and Coffea robusta. The main coffee variety, Coffea arabica, is noted for its high quality.

You’ll find that coffee plants really thrive in tropical and subtropical regions where there’s plenty of rain and the temperatures are just right. Usually kept around 6 feet, the plant can grow up to 30 feet. The coffee plant produces a fruit that people often call a cherry.

Harvesting coffee is quite a detailed and challenging task, requiring a team with specific skills. Selective harvesting is important for coffee cherries because they do not all ripen at the same time. Coffee harvesting has two main processes. One is manual harvesting, where workers hand-pick the coffee cherries, and the other is mechanical harvesting, which is all about strip-picking the cherries from the plants.

Manual picking of perfectly ripe cherries is the principal way of manufacturing specialty coffee. Skilled cherry pickers use selective plucking. The process involves picking cherries that are perfectly ripe, while leaving the ones that are either not quite ready or too ripe still on the tree.

Strip-picking harvests the entire crop at once, regardless of ripeness, in large-scale coffee production. This approach involves using machines to pick the coffee cherries from the coffee plants. When we get to the processing stage, we make sure to get rid of any cherries that are either not ripe enough or too ripe.

Processing coffee cherries involves removing the outer layers to reveal the beans. The coffee processing industry uses two methods: wet and dry.

The wet processing technique involves using water to remove the outer layers of the cherry. Water softens cherries and makes their outer layers easier to remove from beans. Wash and dry the beans.

The natural method, often called the dry method, involves letting the cherries soak up the sun for a few weeks until they reach the right level of dryness. The drying out of the cherry’s outer layers makes them more fragile, allowing them to come off easily. After that, the beans are quality-checked and packed for international trade.