How much are you willing to pay for this cup of coffee during the whole process of manual processing of raw coffee beans?

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Author = Huang Yileng

I once did a crazy experiment in which a relative of a neighbor grew coffee in Nantou water, so he gave me a bag of coffee beans. I was actually a little silly when I received it. I didn't quite know what to do with the bag of coffee beans. I also checked a lot of data on the Internet for this.

The coffee beans I received are about the size of a basin, and the unprocessed coffee fruit is red. The first step is to peel the beans, which feels a bit like peeling betel nuts. After peeling them, you will see the coffee beans wrapped in a thin layer of pectin. Then find a way to remove that layer of pectin.

There are two main ways to remove pectin. The most commonly used method is washing, or the ancient sunburn method. Generally speaking, these methods are used in the treatment plant, but I do not have the equipment of the treatment plant, and it happened to be winter when there was no sunshine. It is also impossible to take the sun treatment. While washing removes pectin through the fermentation process, I do not have the expertise. If I do not control the coffee beans properly, they will stink.

Later, it was found on the Internet that the third method was to use lime to remove that layer of pectin, but the tragic thing was that the pectin would not fall off itself after mixing with lime, but still had to be peeled off one by one with my fingernails. I didn't count the total number of coffee beans in that pot, but I only remember going out with my family that day and sitting in the back seat of the car with a bucket of coffee beans in my arms. I didn't get rid of all the pectin until I got home in the evening.

It's not easy to finish pectin, but it's not over yet. The next step is to dry the coffee beans. To keep the moisture content below 13%, I didn't have any practical equipment to measure it at that time. I could only judge by the color of the coffee beans.

So I left the coffee beans in the air outlet of the dehumidifier to dry, and then the coffee beans began to crack, which is a layer of soft shell outside the coffee beans, so I began to peel off the soft shells one by one.

After peeling off, the finished product will also have a thin film called silver skin. Sometimes in the process of baking beans, the silver skin will be burned by firepower, and the silver skin is healthy. If you have tried to peel off the silver skin and drink it in water, you will find that it tastes a bit like tea.

The next step is to continue the drying. I put the coffee beans in the electric stove and kept blowing the hot air. I forgot how long it took until the whole beans had shrunk, and then I threw the beans into the heater to continue to bake, so that the film outside the beans was burned. A complete big project like this will take about two whole days, and the last one is the coffee beans we usually see.

At first, I started peeling from a large bag of coffee fruit, but in the end, there were about five cups of coffee beans after drying, and there were only three cups of coffee left after grinding. Therefore, you might as well think about how much you are willing to pay for a cup of coffee.