Seed to Cup 101ish

Hello Steemians!

Being my first coffee post, I wanted it to be an intro on how coffee gets to you. Coffee brings a whole new level of appreciation when you understand all the work that the coffee supply chain puts in to arrive in your cup.

Three weeks ago, I made a trip to Guatemala for a wedding of some dear friends. It was my first time to visit any of the coffee growing regions and it was so eye opening!

Our friends were amazing in that they planned out a trip to Finca Filadelfia Coffee for their guests and I took a few pictures while there; I’ll use those to illustrate the process coffee takes from seed to cup as best I can.

Seeds to full grown plants

At the beginning of a coffee plant’s life it is just a seed, no they aren’t beans, and that seed matures and begins to sprout. Once it has sprouted and is ready to be rooted, it is placed in bags outside in a nursery to grow under careful watch.

At this point you can still identify the coffee seed, but eventually it grows out of it's seed casing and is a tiny fragile coffee plant. This process takes about 6 to 8 weeks.

These seedlings are then left in the nursery for about one and a half years. In the nursery area, certain shade bearing trees are grown and pruned to let in just the right amount of sun for the young plants beneath them.

After they have grown to about 2 feet in height, the plants are strong enough to be out in the elements with the rest of the production plants. After this, it will still take the plant about 3 years before it has fully matured and is producing a normal yield.

Unfortunately, the time of season we were visiting was the end of the harvest so there weren’t very many coffee cherries left on the plants. However, our guide spoke about how the pickers make their living and it is really humbling to think of the labor these pickers do for the pay they receive. All the coffee is picked by hand and they have to have an eye for picking the ripe cherries and leaving the unripened ones to develop further.

At the end of the workday, the foreman will come by with a truck and all the pickers will line the road with their work for the day and load it up to be weighed. The coffee pickers are paid for each quintal (or 100 pounds) of ripe cherries they pick, receiving about $7 per 100-pound sack. On average, they will pick somewhere between 1 to 1 ½ quintals a day.

All the cherries the foreman has picked up are now taken to a weighing station. Located directly below that weigh station, using only gravity and water channels, the cherries are moved throughout the processing warehouse.

The coffee at this specific finca was processed two ways. They had a washed process where the coffee is depulped, the seed is removed, and the coffee is then placed on drying patios to dry in the sun. This process in my opinion creates a much more clean, yet complex, cup of coffee.

The second method is a dry method, or natural processing; this is a method where the coffee is placed on the drying patios with the cherry still intact. This method will result in much more fruit forward coffee due to the seed of the cherry absorbing some of that delicious fruit flavor as it dries out.

The coffee is then dehulled and sent through a density separator that will sort the coffee based on density for quality assurance.

This whole process takes about one year to complete and it is only then that it is then bagged up and ready for shipping around the world. The coffee is shipped unroasted (called green beans at this point) in order to give the receiving buyer/roaster the option of how they would like to treat that coffee.

This green coffee now has the long journey of being taken to an exporter, who ships it overseas (most times) to an importer, who sells it to a roastery, who in turn sells it to a coffee shop to brew.

By the time that coffee ends up in your cup, it has grown from a seed to a full plant over the course of a few years, fruited, hand-picked with love, passed over and processed, traveled halfway across the world and made it to your local coffee shop for you to enjoy.

So next time you buy a cup of coffee, take a moment to appreciate all the work, love, hands, and time that went into getting it to you.

Stay classy, stay caffeinated.

• Gordie