There are three main ways to harvest coffee beans, coffee and cherries.

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Coffee cherries are mostly ripe from June to August in Arabica and from September to October in Robusta. For coffee quality and flavor, coffee cherry harvest is a very critical step, the subsequent stages can only maintain, can not improve the quality and flavor of coffee. The harvest methods of coffee cherries include mechanical harvesting and manual harvesting.

There are three main ways to harvest coffee beans:

1. Stripping: peel off the ripe (red) and unripe (green) coffee fruits on the branches and peel them all at once. This method of harvesting is fast, but it is only suitable for areas where the climate is dry, because after every heavy rain, a batch of coffee fruits ripen. In some large farms in Brazil, there are artificial sprinkler systems that can control the ripening time of coffee fruits without listening to the sky. When a large number of coffee fruits on the tree turn red, they can be quickly collected by string peeling, and then the light, immature beans are removed by a floating water test.

two。 Manual picking (Hand Picking): for example, in Vietnam or Laos, there are several heavy rains during the rainy season, each time it will blossom after a rain, and then bear fruit, so the coffee fruit will mature in different stages, even on the same branch, there will be red (ripe) and green (immature) fruit at the same time, mature fruit can not stay on the tree for too long, because bad will turn black and become rotten beans. Therefore, it is impossible to use the method of string peeling, so the grains must be picked by hand, and only the red ones must be picked.

3. Machine harvesting (Mechanical Harvesting): large farms in Australia and Brazil use large self-propelled machines to harvest cherries from branches and put them in bags or trucks. It is generally believed that high-quality coffee can only be obtained by picking by hand. For a small coffee farmer, yes. However, for a modern medium to large farm, high-quality coffee beans can also be obtained by using different harvesting methods. Why? As mentioned before, only freshly ripe coffee beans without defects can become high-quality coffee beans. If the late screening and separation techniques are done well, no matter how they are picked, only fresh and mature coffee beans can be retained to become high-quality coffee.

Coffee cherries should be screened after harvest to avoid the impact of immature and overripe fruits on the quality of the whole batch of berries. In coffee gardens with low pay for labor and lack of funds to purchase equipment, berry selection depends entirely on manual work. Coffee gardens with better conditions use a sink and buoyancy to screen berries: ripe fruit sinks to the bottom, immature fruit floats on the surface, and then treated separately.