The way coffee is harvested

The harvest time is mostly in the dry season. In Brazil, for example, around June, it starts in the north-eastern state of Bahia and ends in October in the southern state of Parana. The harvest period for Central American countries is from September to January of the following year, from lowlands to highlands.

Harvesting methods can be divided into two categories, one is hand picking method, the other is shaking method.

(1) hand picking

With the exception of Brazil and Ethiopia, most Arabica coffee-producing countries are harvested by hand. Hand picking not only removes ripe bright red coffee, but also sometimes along with immature cyan beans and branches, so these immature beans are often mixed with refined coffee beans, especially when they are refined by natural drying. If these beans are mixed with baking, they will produce a disgusting stench.

(2) shake-down method

This method is to hit the ripe fruit or shake the coffee branch with a random stick, so that the fruit falls and accumulates into a pile. Larger estates use large harvesters, while small and medium-sized farms harvest with a sea of people mobilized by the whole family. This method of shaking the fruit off the ground is easier to mix with impurities and defective beans than the hand-picking method, and beans from some places can be stained with a strange smell or fermented because the ground is wet. Producers of Robusta coffee beans such as Brazil and Ethiopia are mostly harvested in this way.

Countries harvested by shaking and falling method also adopt natural drying method to refine coffee beans. Coffee blossoms in spring, bears fruit in summer and harvests in winter, so it is very difficult to harvest and dry in places where there is no clear distinction between drought and rainy seasons. in the rainy season, it is impossible to use natural drying. Therefore, coffee is suitable for growing in areas with early and rainy seasons.