The harvesting of the coffee is very important for the quality of the bean. The most widely used harvesting methods are:
-Hand picking
This is the ideal harvesting method because only the ripe coffee fruit is picked. Often pickers have to pass by the same tree twice to harvest the fruit. Only ripe fruit, so-called “cherries”, that are deep red or bright yellow (depending on the variety of coffee) are harvested. These cherries should be healthy and their quality should not been affected by harmful organisms. The advantages of the hand picking method are that only cherries are picked (homogeneous harvesting), they are free from any signs of damage caused by using mechanical methods and they can be harvested even from the hardest-to-reach trees. The disadvantage of this method is that harvesting takes a very long time to complete. Although it is the most costly method for a business, it can increase both the quality and the price of the coffee. It is only used for exceptional varieties.
-Stripping
The alternative to handpicking is stripping. In this method, fruit is not hand-picked. All of the fruit, including unripe and overripe fruit, is stripped off of the branch at one time by pickers. This is a quicker method than hand picking. Coffee fruit can be harvested from hard-to-reach parts of the trees, but the lack of heterogeneity in the crop harvested is much higher. The main disadvantage of this method is that the plant can be partially or totally destroyed. After harvesting, coffee fruit is often separated and sorted according to various criteria.
-Mechanical Stripping
This is a fast automated method enabling a non-uniform crop to be picked but provides no access to hard-to-reach parts of the trees. Mechanical harvesters move through the rows equipped with vibrating poles or brushes that pass through the branches and cut off the fruit. The fruit must be separated and sorted after harvesting. This method is clearly cheaper for a business when there are large areas under cultivation, but it often wounds the tree and negatively impacts on the quality of the fruit. This type of harvesting requires very flat plantations.
Once the coffee has been picked, it is transferred to the processing plant the same day. During bean processing, the following critical steps affect coffee quality:
-Fruit selection (ripe fruit is sorted from unripe fruit)
-Fermentation (if this procedure is followed) and fermentation time
-The drying process where the coffee dries to reach the desired moisture levels.
