How Is Coffee Harvested? Why Picking Ripe Coffee Cherries Matters
Coffee cherries don't all ripen at once. I will explain how coffee is picked, why ripeness matters and just how much work happens before coffee ever reaches the roastery.
We've already established something important: Coffee doesn't grow in bags. It grows on plants, as fruit. Read about the coffee plant here And before we can roast those beautiful little seeds, someone has to pick the fruit. This sounds simple. It isn't.
Waiting for the right moment
Coffee plants don't produce coffee cherries that all ripen at exactly the same time.
On the same branch, you can have:
Green cherries – not yet ripe.
Yellow or orange cherries – depending on the variety, approaching ripeness.
Red cherries – often ripe and ready to pick.
Overripe cherries – past their best.
For specialty coffee, getting the timing right is extremely important. The aim is to harvest cherries at the right stage of ripeness. Why? Because the cherry's maturity has a major influence on the quality of the coffee inside.
Three to five years for the first harvest
Coffee farming requires patience. A newly planted coffee tree generally takes several years before it produces its first meaningful crop. Once the plants are productive, farmers then have to manage them year after year. That means pruning, fertilising, managing shade, controlling pests and diseases, dealing with weather and, eventually, harvesting the cherries. And then they start all over again.
Hand-picking
In many specialty coffee-producing regions, coffee is harvested by hand. A picker moves through the plants and selects ripe cherries. This is called selective picking.
The advantage is obvious:You can choose the cherries that are ready and leave the others on the plant.
The picker can return later when those green cherries have ripened. This sounds like the perfect system. There's just one problem. It takes a lot of time. And time means labour.
Strip harvesting
There is another approach. Instead of selecting individual ripe cherries, the picker strips the cherries from a branch in one movement. This is known as strip harvesting. It can be much faster. But the harvest can contain a mixture of ripe, underripe and overripe fruit. For large-scale commercial coffee production, this can make economic sense. For specialty coffee, however, producers often put considerably more emphasis on selecting ripe cherries.
Machines can harvest coffee too
Not all coffee is harvested by hand. In some large coffee-growing regions, mechanical harvesting is widely used. Machines can remove large quantities of cherries quickly. This can be particularly effective on farms with relatively flat terrain and coffee plants that have been managed for mechanical harvesting. But coffee farms are not all the same. Many specialty coffee farms are located on steep mountainsides where machines simply aren't practical. In those places, humans remain the most effective harvesting technology ever invented.
Why ripeness matters
Imagine picking an apple. You probably wouldn't deliberately mix a hard, green apple with a rotten one and expect them both to taste exactly the same. Coffee is no different. The chemistry of the coffee cherry changes as it ripens. That means the stage at which it is harvested can affect the characteristics of the resulting coffee. Good harvesting isn't simply about getting cherries off the tree. It's about getting the right cherries off the tree.
What happens after picking?
Harvesting is only the beginning. Once the cherries have been picked, they need to be processed. And this is where another fascinating part of the coffee story begins. The producer needs to decide what to do with the fruit surrounding the seeds. Should it be removed immediately? Should the whole cherry be dried? Should some of the fruit remain during drying? Different answers produce different processing methods. And those methods can have a significant influence on the final flavour.
Why specialty coffee costs more
This is one of the things that is easy to forget when we look at the price of a bag of coffee. Someone had to grow the plant. Someone had to look after it for years. Someone had to harvest it. And in many cases, someone had to walk through the coffee plants repeatedly, selecting ripe cherries one by one. That labour has value.
At Al-Gharb Coffee Roasters, we work with traceable coffees and place importance on the producers and farms behind them. Our sourcing approach focuses on small farms and micro-lots and on paying fair prices for quality coffee.
So when you pay a little more for a specialty coffee, you're not simply paying for a fancier bag. You're paying for the work that went into producing and selecting better coffee.
From cherry to coffee
Once the harvest is complete, the cherries don't look much like the coffee beans we're familiar with. They're fruit. The seeds are still surrounded by pulp, mucilage, parchment and other layers. The next job is to remove those layers and dry the coffee properly. That's coffee processing. And there isn't just one way to do it. In fact, processing can completely change the character of a coffee. Which brings us to the next part of the journey: Washed. Natural. Honey. Three words you'll see on specialty coffee bags.
And three very different ways of turning freshly harvested coffee cherries into green coffee.
— Henning Al-Gharb Coffee Roasters, Algarve
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