HARVEST AND BENEFIT OF COFFEE:

In today's post I will be talking about the harvest and the benefit of coffee because a few days ago when I published my visit to the coffee plantation there were many friends who asked me about the process that takes from the recolceccion of the cherry in the bush to have the almonds ready to toast. In general, this topic has several concepts and technical parameters that should be controlled, but we will leave for the most specialists and practitioners of the subject. The harvest of coffee in my country Venezuela, occurs once a year between the months of October and February according to the altitude of the plot. In the low areas begins at the beginning of October and in the highest areas between the middle and the end of December. The optimum point for the harvest of the cherries, it shows the same plantation and is at the point of maximum maturation, where red is more alive. The preparation to start the harvest begins a month before approximately with the weeding of the land to be harvested, the acquisition of the materials to be used during the harvest, the calibration of the pulping machine, among other points.

The harvest must be done in batches to keep track of the harvested places, besides being one of the characteristics for the subject of traceability, which requires the regulation of special coffees. Once the harvest is started, a row of coffee plants is assigned to each person, who will only harvest the fruits at the optimum point of maturity and without scraping the mat to avoid breaking the leaves of the tree unnecessarily. That you collect ripe fruits does not indicate that at a certain moment you do not inadvertently start some green or pintona cherry, something that will be extracted in the next selection that is made in the profit plant.

The cherries that are collected are thrown into a basket that is made of a plant called cane brava and fill it is emptied into the bag that will be the same as we will use to transfer the day's harvest, in donkeys or mules, to the center of benefit. It is important while harvesting to keep the bag closed with your mouth to avoid the escape and propagation of the bit, which is one of the pests that most attack this crop.

In the profit center, it is decided what type of benefit is going to be given to the coffee, it can be wet or dry, according to the criterion of the administrator of the farm and according to the need of the market. Many we lean towards the wet process and that's why we'll talk about it in this post. We proceed to extract the green cherries, pintonas and over ripe, so that our coffee is of excellent quality. Then the coffee is emptied in the pulping machine, which is used to remove the shell from the grains and then left to ferment for about 12 hours to naturally remove the pulp from the grain. This pulp is known as mucilage. If it is not fermented, it will be almost impossible to remove the mucilage from the coffee bean.

Once we ferment, we proceed to wash the grains to extract as mentioned above, the pulp. The grains are white and their roughness tells us that they are ready to move on to the next part of the benefit, which is drying. For this purpose, it can be done in two ways, one is to empty it in a cement floor as it was traditionally done or apply copper beds African that we had to build previously. Coffee that dries on African beds is more valuable to the consumer than drying on the ground. This is why it is about drying, according to our capacity on the farm, on African beds. In addition to drying the process is done much faster.

Once the coffee is dry at about 12% humidity, it is then threshed, a process that is carried out to remove the coffee husk known as parchment. And then it is polished in a polishing machine which is like a rectifier of the threshing process and leaves the coffee ready to be selected by size and to extract those defective grains. Once the selection process is finished, it is stored in jute bags, to maintain humidity. We can already say that the profit has been completed and the coffee is ready for marketing to the roasters.