Coffee Processing

The way that coffee beans make their way from the plant to your automatic coffee maker at home is quite a journey. This is a short explanation of how coffee is processed.

When the coffee berries are picked, they must subsequently be dried. This can happen in two fundamental ways – the dry or the wet method.

The dry method is the simplest method, and provides berries in a thin layer of the sun and turned often. After 2-3 weeks, they have been so dry the coffee beans to crack out the flesh. This method is the original and the cheapest.

The wet method is to put coffee berries in water where they float to a mill where the coffee beans are separated from the flesh. Then out beans for fermentation tanks, where a fermentation process is decisive for how the coffee will taste. This method of drying coffee beans in, is considerably more resource intensive than the dry method, and therefore used the wet method as a starting point only for coffee, which has a high quality, for example. often the case with espresso coffee.

Roasting can also be done in two ways.

Fast roasting takes place in an oven that is 800 degrees hot. At this temperature the coffee is roasted at approx. 90 sec., But then goes a portion of coffee flavor lost in the process.

Slow roasting takes place at 230 degrees, and here take a roasting around. 20 min. The first 10 minutes caramelized coffee beans and the next 10 minutes develops the flavor. It goes without saying that this method is more expensive than the rapid roasting, then slow roasting takes much longer and thus may be a furnace only handle a very small amount of coffee. The taste will be much better, and again used this method as the basis only of high quality coffee.

That is, slow roasting and drying by the wet method provides both a coffee with more aroma and taste of it.