Coffee cultivation and processing

The cultivation of coffee is characterized by precise environmental requirements and harvesting processes: in fact, coffee plant has tropical origin, thus needs special climatic conditions to grow properly; it must be preserved from cold, excessive heat and wind. Coffee plant fructification is extremely irregular: on the same branch can grow both flowers and berries at different stages of maturation and this represents a problem in the harvesting process that consists of two main methods: the “picking”, consisting in the manual selection of matured cherries by the experts, and the “stripping”, consisting in the complete bare of the plant after the period of average maturation.

Once the harvest process is over, coffee beans can be processed according to two main methods: in the wet or in the dry. The first method requires that coffee beans, once peeled, are subjected to fermentation, washed by powerful jets of water and putted to dry in the sun before proceeding to polishing (removal of scraps).

The second method consists in drying the whole coffee berries, subsequently inserted in a machine to extract the beans.