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Picking Coffee
The fruit of the coffee bean plants are harvested only once or twice a year depending on the wet seasons of that region. When the fruit is ripe it is either hand picked by workers or shaken from the plant with a cloth place beneath the plant to collect the fallen berries. The process is made more difficult, however, by the fact that the fruit on a single tree, and even on the same branch, may be at all stages of development. This means that the cherries must be picked very carefully so that only the best are taken. Some growers will spray the trees with a chemical called ethephon which speeds up the ripening process so that more cherries are ready for harvest at the same time.
At any rate, picking cherries is a slow process. An average picker can fill one 150 pound bag in about one and one-half days! After the cherries are picked, it still remains for the actual coffee beans to be extracted. How a bean is processed will determine some of the characteristics of that particular crop.
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