What Happens to the cherries once they have been picked?
The coffee beans must be dried and prepared for roasting. There are two ways of preparing coffee beans – the ‘dry’ method and the ‘wet’ method. With the dry method, freshly picked red coffee ‘cherries’ are spread across special mats and left in the sun to dry for two to three weeks. With the ‘wet’ method, a ‘pulping’ machine is used to remove the outer pulp away from the ‘cherries’. The resulting “parchment coffee” is fermented and soaked to remove any remaining pulp. Then the parchment coffee is hulled to obtain the beans. At this stage, coffee beans have a greenish tinge and are therefore known as ‘green beans’, which have almost no coffee smell or taste. Before being packed into bags and shipped across the world, green beans are sorted, graded and checked to ensure a high quality end product. Stinkers, blacks, sours and foxes are just a few of the names for imperfect beans that are rejected. It is not until the green beans are roasted that they release the coffee aroma and flavor as
