We are smack-dab in the middle of coffee harvest. Coffee cherries are turning red on the trees, and we are scrambling to get our picking teams to every tree, so no cherries are wasted. What does a coffee cherry look like? Our trees flower in December. Then a small, green fruit develops. As the fruit ripens, it matures and turns red over the course of 8-9 months. The best time to pick the cherries is when they are red and juicy. Like any fruit, coffee is best when it’s ripe. If left on the tree after it ripens, a coffee cherry gets soft and wine-colored. Eventually, if it isn’t picked, the coffee fruit will turn black and shrivel. We try to pick our cherries red. Each evening, we use water-based machines to sort the cherries (because a few black and green beans inevitably make their way into pickers’ baskets) and pulp the fruits. We pulp the cherries (taking off their skins) because our coffee season occurs during our rainy season, which means a complicated drying process. Pulping the beans helps them dry faster. We also have covered drying patios, so rain doesn’t fall on the drying coffee and ruin it’s taste.

I’ll post more pictures of our entire coffee harvest process over the next few weeks. But since the coffee cherry is the heart of our operation, we’ll start with it’s life cycle.
Abraços,
Frances