Coffee from Seed to Cup in 10 Easy Steps

The coffee you drink every day has traveled a great distance to reach your cup of delight.

Coffee beans go through a usual set of stages between the time they are grown, harvested, and bought in order to bring out their greatest flavor.

Planting young coffee plants is the first step.

It is really a seed that is used to make coffee. It is used to make coffee after it has been dried, roasted, and ground. If the seed is not treated, it may be planted and will eventually develop into a coffee plant.

Coffee seedlings are often sown in huge beds in shady nurseries to ensure a successful harvest. The seedlings will be watered on a regular basis and kept out of direct sunlight until they are strong enough to be transplanted into permanent locations. Planting is often done during the rainy season in order to keep the soil moist as the roots grow and become well-anchored in the ground.

Harvesting the Cherries (Phase 2)

Coffee cherries ripening on a tree
It will take roughly 3 to 4 years for the freshly planted coffee trees to yield fruit, depending on the species of coffee tree. When the fruit, known as the coffee cherry, is fully mature and ready to be plucked, it develops a vibrant, deep red color.

Typically, there is just one large harvest every year. In places like as Colombia, where there are two flowerings every year, there is a primary crop and a secondary crop that are harvested.

In most nations, the crop is harvested by hand, which is a time-consuming and arduous procedure; however, in locations such as Brazil, where the terrain is relatively flat and the coffee fields are vast, the process has been automated to save time and effort. Regardless of whether the coffee is harvested by hand or by machine, it is always harvested in one of two ways:

Strip-picked cherries are cherries that have been peeled off their branches at the same time, either by machine or by hand.

Selected for Ripeness: Only the best-looking and most ripe cherries are selected, and they are each chosen by hand. Approximately every eight to ten days, cherry pickers cycle among the trees, selecting just those cherries that are at their ripeest. It is generally employed to harvest the finer Arabica beans due to the fact that it is a more labor-intensive and expensive method of harvesting.

In a typical day, a competent picker may select roughly 100 to 200 pounds of coffee cherries, which will yield 20 to 40 pounds of ground coffee. Each employee’s daily load is meticulously weighed, and each picker is compensated according to the quality of his or her job. After that, the harvest for the day is delivered to the processing facility.

3rd, Processing the Cherries

Once the coffee has been collected, it must be processed as soon as possible in order to avoid fruit rotting. Caffeine is digested in one of two ways, depending on where you are and what resources are available:

Coffee is processed using the Dry Method, which has been around for a long time and is still utilized in many places with limited water supplies. The cherries are simply spread out on large surfaces to dry in the sun once they have been plucked fresh. They are raked and rotated during the day to keep them from deteriorating, and they are covered at night or during rainstorms to keep them from getting wet and rotting. Depending on the weather, this procedure may take several weeks for each batch of coffee, or until the moisture content of the cherries has dropped below 11 percent, depending on the climate.

After harvesting, the Wet Method eliminates the pulp from the coffee cherry, allowing the bean to be dried with just the parchment skin remaining on the bean. Prior to being used, the newly picked cherries are run through a pulping machine in order to remove the skin and pulp from the bean within.

The beans are then segregated based on their weight as they move through a series of water channels. The lighter beans float to the top of the water, while the heavier mature beans sink to the bottom of the container. Afterwards, they are put through a series of spinning drums that separate them according to their size.

Following separation, the beans are transferred to enormous fermentation tanks that are filled with water. Based on a variety of conditions, including the state of the beans, the environment, and the altitude, they will stay in these tanks for anywhere from 12 to 48 hours in order to remove the slick coating of mucilage (known as the parenchyma) that has adhered to the parchment throughout the drying process. Natural enzymes present in the tanks will cause this layer to disintegrate while the fish is resting in the tanks.

When fermentation is complete, the beans have a gritty texture to them when you touch them. Afterwards, the beans are cleaned by passing through more water channels and are ready to be dried.

4. Drying the Beans Coffee cherries

Following wet processing, it is necessary to dry the pulped and fermented beans to roughly 11 percent moisture content in order to appropriately prepare them for storage once they have been dried to 11 percent moisture content.

It is possible to sun-dry these beans while still in their parchment envelope (the endocarp) by spreading them out on drying tables or floors and turning them periodically, or they may be machine-dried in huge tumblers. The dried beans are known as parchment coffee, and they are stored in jute or sisal bags until they are ready to be sent overseas.

5. Preparing the Beans for Milling

Coffee beans are being processed.
In order to be exported, parchment coffee must first go through the following processing steps:

A hulling machine is a machine that removes the parchment layer (endocarp) from wet-processed coffee. Hulling dry processed coffee refers to the process of removing the dried husk of the dried cherries in their whole, including the exocarp, mesocarp, and endocarp.

After hulling, polishing is an optional operation in which any silver skin that remains on the beans after hulling is mechanically removed from them. While polished beans are often seen as better than unpolished ones, in practice, there is little difference between the two types of beans.

Grading and sorting are done according to size and weight, and the beans are also checked for color faults or other abnormalities before being packaged.

Beans are sized after they have been passed through a series of screening screens. Heavy and light beans are separated utilizing an air jet to sort the beans pneumatically as well as mechanically.

Typically, the bean size is displayed on a scale ranging from 10 to 20 in diameter. 1/64th of an inch is the diameter of a round hole, and the number indicates the diameter of a round hole in inches. A number 10 bean would be about the size of a hole with a diameter of 10/64 of an inch, while a number 15 bean would be approximately the size of a hole with a diameter of 15/64 of an inch.

A last step involves the removal of faulty beans, which may be done by hand or by machine. It is necessary to eliminate beans that are undesirable owing to inadequacies (bad size or color, over-fermented beans, insect-damaged beans, unhulled beans). In many nations, this procedure is carried out both by machine and by hand, guaranteeing that only the highest-quality coffee beans are sent out the country.

6. Exporting the Beans exporting beans is the sixth step.

A variety of packaging options are used to transport the milled beans, commonly known as green coffee, aboard ships. These include jute or sisal bags placed into shipping containers or bulk transportation within plastic-lined containers.

According to the USDA Foreign Agriculture Service, the world’s coffee output is expected to reach 152.7 million 60-kg bags in the 2015/16 crop year.

7. Having a Cup of Coffee

Cupping coffee at the source
Coffee is subjected to a series of quality and flavor tests. Cupping is the term used to describe this procedure, which is normally performed in a room that has been particularly constructed to accommodate the procedure.

In the first instance, the taster — sometimes known as the cupper — analyzes the beans based on their overall visual appearance. The beans are then roasted in a tiny laboratory roaster before being instantly ground and infused in boiling water at a temperature that has been precisely regulated. The cupper sniffs the brew to get a sense of its scent, which is an important step in determining the quality of the coffee.
Once the coffee has been allowed to rest for some minutes, the cupper breaks up the crust by brushing off any grinds that have accumulated on top of the cup. After another sniff of the coffee, it is time to begin the tasting.
Using one scoop and one fast inhale, the cupper tastes the coffee for the first time. Ideally, the coffee should be sprayed uniformly across the cupper’s taste receptors before being weighed on the tongue before being spat out.
Every day, samples from a diverse range of batches and various beans are tasted. Coffees are not only evaluated to discover their qualities and defects, but they are also blended and roasted to provide the best flavor and aroma possible. In a single day, a skilled cupper may taste hundreds of samples of coffee and yet discern the small distinctions between each of them.

8. Preparing the Coffee Batch

During the roasting process, green coffee is transformed into the delicious brown beans that we buy from our favorite retailers or cafés. The majority of roasting equipment operate at a temperature of around 550 degrees Fahrenheit. In order to prevent the beans from burning, they must be maintained moving during the whole procedure.

At around 400 degrees Fahrenheit, they begin to turn brown and the caffeol, a fragrant oil that has been contained inside the beans, starts to emerge. This process, known as pyrolysis, is at the core of the roasting process, since it is responsible for the taste and fragrance of the coffee we consume.

As soon as the beans are roasted, they are promptly cooled, either by air or by water. Roasting is often carried out in importing nations because freshly roasted beans must reach the customer as promptly as possible once they have been roasted.

9. Coffee grounds are pounded to a fine powder.

The goal of a perfect grind is to get the maximum amount of taste from a cup of coffee. The coarseness or fineness with which the coffee is ground is determined by the brewing technique.

Because of the amount of time the grinds will be in contact with water, the appropriate grade of grind is determined. Generally speaking, the finer the grind, the quicker the coffee needs be made to taste good. As a result, coffee ground for an espresso machine is significantly finer in texture than coffee ground for a drip coffee maker.

Espresso machines extract coffee by applying pressure of 132 pounds per square inch to the ground beans.
Taking a time to scrutinize the beans and inhale their fragrance is highly recommended; the smell of coffee, on its own, has been demonstrated to have stimulating effects on the brain.