About the defective beans of raw beans

The same apple tree does not necessarily have a sweet and sour taste, not every apple has a good appearance and consistent maturity, some may have been bitten by insects, some may be stunted, and so on, this is a very normal phenomenon. The same is true of coffee. The raw coffee beans obtained from the processed coffee fruits of coffee trees are not necessarily good raw beans, so they are divided into high and low grades. The most important factor affecting the quality and grade of raw coffee beans is defective beans.

Defective beans, as the name implies, are defective beans, bad beans, just like bad apples. There are a variety of reasons and many kinds of coffee. Here is a detailed description of the things that affect the quality of coffee.

A variety of factors can cause defective beans. Defective beans can be produced as large as the growing environment of coffee trees and as small as the process of harvesting and processing raw beans. Raw coffee beans will absorb the ingredients contained in the soil where they are planted, and if they contain too much iodine, as in the soil in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the final coffee precipitated after adsorption will also have iodine flavor, although it may not be obvious. The climatic conditions of coffee planting land, the amount of rainfall will affect the growth of raw coffee beans, and due to lack of nutrients will also produce stunted coffee beans. Worms can easily cause insect damage to beans when they drill into the coffee fruit to lay eggs. In addition, the growing environment can cause two special defective beans: like beans and round beans. Elephant beans are bigger than ordinary raw beans. Round beans are, as the name suggests, a coffee fruit with only one round seed. When the quantity of these two kinds is small, it will not have much effect on the taste of coffee, but it is best to pick them out by hand, and it is more appropriate to bake them separately when they accumulate to a certain amount.

(round beans)

(stunted beans)

(insect-infested beans)

Defective beans can also be produced during coffee harvesting. If mechanical harvesting is used, it is easy to pick the immature fruits together, so that the final raw beans will be mixed with immature beans, leaves, branches and other impurities. If unripe beans are not singled out, it is easy to make coffee taste cloudy, sometimes producing wood flavor and stimulating strong taste. On the other hand, premature coffee beans fall to the ground before picking and are easy to ferment into black beans and easy to pick out.

(black beans, shell beans, broken beans)

Defective beans can also be produced in the treatment of raw coffee beans. When using sun treatment, if the weather conditions are not ideal, or rainfall, or untimely and uneven turning, it is easy to produce dried beans and mildew beans (too wet in the process of transportation and storage will also cause mildew beans); washing treatment will also produce fermented beans if the fermentation tank is not clean. Fermented beans have a great impact on the taste of coffee. It has been said that a fermented bean can destroy 50g of good beans. Shelling and pulp removal by machine are easy to produce broken beans and incomplete peeled beans (the shell burns when baked). When using the drying method, some poor drying will also produce shell beans, which break at the central line and turn out like a shell on the inside. Shell beans and broken beans can easily cause uneven baking and affect the taste of the final coffee.

(broken beans, pest beans, shell beans)

(all kinds of defective beans)

(neat coffee and raw beans)

Different coffee defective beans will have different effects on the coffee taste, but in any case it will cause the coffee taste to be cloudy or form a bad taste, thus masking the beautiful ingredients. If you taste the coffee flavor extracted by roasting with defective beans, you will know how much the defective beans have an effect on the coffee taste. That's why we have to pick out the defective beans by hand, so we'll learn about hand selection in the next section.