How to treat fresh coffee fruit into raw coffee beans

Treatment of raw beans

It is true that the variety of coffee determines the natural flavor, but the treatment of raw beans determines the acquired quality. Selected coffee attaches great importance to flavor and quality, so it pays special attention to the technology and details of processing.

Harvest: the harvest method is one of the criteria for judging selected coffee. if calculated from the time of germination, Arabica coffee will take about 5 years to blossom and bear fruit.

Many large coffee farms in Brazil, called "Fazendas", often use machines to harvest, but the grade is not the worst. The worst coffee may come from unorganized small farmers who have no concept of quality control, handle it indiscriminately, and fail to produce good coffee. As a result, selected coffee always comes from small and medium-sized farms run by enterprises, some of which create their own brands and are marketed all over the world. Examples include the Jamaican Blue Mountain Coffee from LaMinita in Costa Rica, Duran in Panama, Wallenford Estate and Sliver Hills Estate in Wallenford.

Coffee harvesting is roughly divided into the following methods:

Machine harvesting: ripe and immature fruits are all picked, of course, there will be bad quality branches, leaves and other sundries.

Rubbing branches: rub along the branches with your fingers from the bottom to the top, and mature and immature fruits will be harvested at the same time, which also has a negative impact on quality.

Tree shaking: fruits that are overripe and dry are usually harvested together.

Manual harvesting method: selected coffee is the use of manual harvesting method, divided into 3 to 6 times to pick red and full fruit.

The method of selecting coffee beans:

Blowing or shaking: float crumbs and low-density beans on top and choose only the lower layer of high-density beans.

Manual method: women sit on both sides of the automatic conveyor belt. Pick out the defective beans one by one.

Electronic method: light system, computer control system and jet system. The raw beans fall one by one from the funnel, and the computer-driven light system emits light. After recovery, the computer analyzes the color, light transmission and size of the raw beans to determine whether they are qualified or not and blow away the unqualified beans.

Treatment: the harvested fruit must enter the treatment program immediately, otherwise it will begin to ferment and make the coffee smell.

Sun-cured beans have a complete natural mellow flavor (Full body), gentle aroma (Mild Aroma) and more fat.

The washing method has a good mellow taste, high aroma and lively sour taste. Mellow taste is an important condition of espresso, which will produce a mellow and smooth feeling as strong as wine. Espresso lovers can increase the weight of sun-dried beans; water-washed beans are as clean as clear wind chimes and are suitable for follicular coffee brewing because they have no miscellaneous taste. In addition, washed beans have a good sour taste, which is the source of sweetness in espresso.

The conditions of different countries are different, the sun method can not be used everywhere, so there is the emergence of water washing method. It rains all the year round in the equatorial area, so washing is mostly used. In the subtropics, because the dry season is quite distinct from the rainy season, many farms use the method of tanning.

Sun drying: also known as "natural drying" (Nature Dry), due to the use of artificial and natural treatment methods, so beans look untidy and unflattering, but with mellow and consistency, quite the preference of some experts.

Choose beans: remove the unripe and overripe ones that float in the sink.

Drying: let the selected ripe fruit be exposed to the sun for 5 days in the square for 6 days until it is fully dry and the moisture content is reduced to 13%.

Shelling: the dried pericarp becomes fragile and easy to peel off, which can be removed by machine. Enterprise-run farms usually set up their own shelling factories, and small farms are handed over to the processing center for processing.

Selection and grading: exquisite farms identify defective beans manually or by machine. Then, according to the established standards, coffee beans are divided into several quality levels.

Polish: use a machine to grind off the silver film, and then pack the coffee beans into a 60kg bag. Jamaican Blue Mountain Coffee is packed in wooden barrels, with 30kg and 70kg.

Water washing: because of the lack of sufficient sunshine conditions in the West Indies, the Dutch introduced "water washing", also known as "WIB" (West Indische Bereiding), around 1740, which is different from "OIB" (Oost Indische Bereiding).

Choose beans: put the fruit in the sink for 24 hours and remove the unripe and overripe ones that float on it.

Remove the pulp: use a machine to remove the pulp, leaving only the coffee beans wrapped in endocarp, and there is a mucous membrane on the outside of the beans. The process of washing is to wash this mucous membrane.

Fermentation: the mucous membrane has strong adhesion and must be kept in the tank for about 18 to 36 hours to ferment and decompose the mucous membrane. One is wet fermentation (Wet Fermentation) and dry fermentation (Dry Fermentation). In the process of fermentation, the seed and the internal pulp will produce special changes, which is the most important step in the washing method to affect the flavor of coffee. Adding hot water and enzymes will have a negative effect. The Sigri Coffee Farm in Papua New Guinea, which prides itself on its unique washing method, ferments for three days and rinses with clean water every 24 hours to produce delicious Sigri coffee.

Washing: put the fermented beans into the pool and pass them back and forth, using the friction of the beans and the power of the water to wash the coffee beans to Sinorama.

Dry: the washed coffee is also wrapped in the pericarp with a moisture content of up to 50%. It must be dried and the moisture content is reduced to 12%. The use of sunlight to dry the flavor is excellent.

Shelling: dried beans can be stored in warehouse or shelled by the factory to remove endocarp and silver film.

Selection and grading: exquisite farms identify defective beans manually or by machine. Then, according to the established standards, coffee beans are divided into several quality levels.

Semi-washed or semi-dried (Semi-wash or semi-dry): the process of drying coffee beans that have removed exocarp and are still covered with silver film and endocarp directly in the sun without fermentation. Mandenin coffee in Sumatra, Indonesia is also semi-washed, drying the fruit in the sun, and then washing off the exocarp with hot water, so that the seeds can be fully fermented in the pulp to produce coffee with a calm and mellow tone.