When is the better time to pick coffee beans in the growing environment?

When is the better time to pick coffee beans in the growing environment?

Most normal coffee trees produce coffee cherries that are smaller than the average, and there is only one bean in the cherry. This kind of single-bean coffee has different names: single round coffee beans, beads or spiral coffee beans. It has no flat side but is small and almost completely round. Sorting out these beans and putting them together is bead coffee, which costs slightly more than ordinary coffee beans from the same tree.

Many people claim that bead coffee will taste better, which may be caused by special sorting.

The special sorting method can pick out any beans that are short, and the quantity is small, so the quality can be further guaranteed.

The ripening period of coffee beans from different varieties and different geographical regions is different. Most Arabica coffee beans have a ripening period of 8 months, while robusta beans have a ripening period of 11 months.

In areas north of the equator (such as Ethiopia and Central America), harvests are usually done from September to November; south of the equator, such as Brazil and Zimbabwe (Zimbabwe), the "harvest" period lasts until August, but the main one is in April or May; equatorial countries, such as Uganda and Colombia, harvest throughout the year, especially those plantations that make good use of different elevations. As a result, there may be new coffee beans for most of the year.

When the coffee fruit is ripe, it should be harvested immediately, but when there are fruits of different ripening stages on the same tree, harvesting is not an easy task, which is time-consuming and labor-consuming. Generally speaking, it takes as long as 5 months to pick up the mature and immature fruits at the same time, so most coffees insist on artificially picking the ripe fruits one by one, carefully picking them from the coffee trees to maintain the perfect taste. Within a year, a typical Arabica coffee tree produces less than 5 kilograms of fruit and can produce about 1 kilogram of coffee beans.

When most of the coffee cherries of a tree are ripe, a picker may "peel" the whole tree, slide down the branches with his fingers, let the ripe and unripe coffee cherries fall to the ground, then rake them up with a rake, and let the workers carry out the "bran".

In areas with relatively high elevations, such mechanical picking method cannot be adopted, and manual picking must be used, which requires a large number of seasonal workers. Pickers should also be careful not to pick unripe, bad or overripe coffee beans, as they will affect the overall quality of the coffee harvested. The original picking method ensures the quality of coffee bean picking to a great extent. Those coffee beans that are not so good are classified as "ordinary", "sour" or "fermented", and the last one is very bad.