Siemens Home Appliances
Harvesting coffee.
Creating the perfect cup begins with harvesting ripe, red, coffee cherries. In most countries, coffee is harvested once per year, however, countries like Colombia, have a climate that is conducive to growing coffee throughout the year, allowing them to produce a smaller secondary crop, called the “fly crop.” Red coffee cherries are harvested, sometimes by hand, and transformed into what the world has come to love, roasted coffee beans.
Harvesting methods.
Choosing the best harvesting method depends on whether you are after quality or quantity.
Picking.
Hand-picking perfectly ripe beans is the best method of ensuring high quality. This time-consuming labor-intensive method relies on pickers selecting and picking individual cherries by hand. Although picking ensures quality, it is by far the most expensive.
Stripping.
When employing the “stripping” method of coffee harvesting workers use a comb-like utensil to strip cherries off branches regardless of their ripeness. When stripping, farmers wait until most of the coffee beans are ripe and then separate out unripe and overripe beans afterwards.
Machine harvesting.
For the larger coffee plantations, mechanical harvesting is used to collect vast amounts of cherries in a short amount of time. As with stripping, this technique waits until most of the beans are ripe and then combs the branches to remove all cherries.
