How it begins...

Sowing

Sowing, as we all know, consists of pouring some seeds into the ground. When it comes to coffee, planting just any old seed (bean) will not do. First, coffee growers must track down the most perfect coffee beans. Once they have done so, they pulp, wash, and dry the beans before planting them in the ground. Sixty days later, the bedding plants are put in a nursery, where they stay for 6 to 8 months. Then, they are transplant in the ground in 3.5-meter intervals and protected from the sun by the leaves of banana trees.

The Rite to Grow

At age three, the coffee tree is topped (crown is removed) so that it grows outwardly; this ritual continues every year afterward. While topping is a popular practice in Colombia, it is not so in other coffee-producing countries.

At age five, the coffee tree begins its period of productivity. For the next fifteen years, its fruit will be available to coffee lovers world-wide.

Caring for the Bean

Coffee growers must constantly protect their trees from sickness and encroaching mushrooms. More and more, coffee growers are allying with popular and efficient replacements to chemical insecticides... everyday honeybees.

Gathering the Coffee

Two ways of gathering exist: picking and stripping.

No contest here; picking is the best method. It consists of hand-picking only the ripe fruit. As this process requires pickers to repick the plant several times, it can take several months. Picking is the method used in Colombia.

Speed, speed, and more speed are the main advantages of the stripping method. Pickers slide their fists along a coffee branch to strip ripe, unripe, and overripe fruits - not to mention leaves and flowers - onto a tarp. Stripping, used in Brazil, results in lower-quality coffee.

Processing

Extracting the bean from all that surrounds it: that's what we mean when we talk about processing coffee. Two very different methods can be used: the wet method, which yields "washed coffees," and the dry method, which yields "natural coffees." Colombia uses the wet method whereas Brazil uses the dry method.

Different approaches