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From the Fields to your Cup
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Once the harvesting has been completed, the seeds must be selected and adequately handled. The seeds must come from healthy plants and ripe fruits, be processed the same day of the harvest, dried in the shade and stored in sisal sacks in ventilated, dry places, Under those conditions, the seeds will preserve a high germinating power during six months after their harvest. If refrigerated, their germinating power shall last for over a year. Afterwards, the germination of the seed takes place, that is, the transformation of the plant’s embryo into a new plant. The coffee plants are collected in a greenhouse in black, plastic bags where they remain during the first four to seven months of their development, receiving special care regarding watering, fertilization and the control of weeds, plagues and illnesses. The plant is now ready to be planted under a full sun (between 900 and 1000 meters high and with an average temperature between 20 and 24°C) or in a shaded area. After two or three years, the coffee plant gives its first fruits, reaching its maximum production in five years when it is stabilized, and it may surpass thirty years of productive life according to the integral attention it receives. So that the flower of the Coffea arábica becomes a ripe fruit, more than 6 to 8 months are required, and 9 to 11 months for the Coffea canéphora. If rain is well distributed throughout the year, we find flowers and fruits with different degrees of ripeness on the plant. In practice, there will be as many harvests as rains have fallen and the plants have bloomed. Harvest times comes along. The harvesters go from plant to plant, with a few weeks of intervals, normally collecting, one by one, the ripe cherries and depositing them in baskets and leaving the others to ripen. This is the most careful and expensive method, known worldwide as “picking”, used in countries that produced washed coffee or arábica, the best internationally priced coffee. In other regions where rain is more concentrated in one or several periods a year, another method is used, “stripping” that consists in waiting for the majority of the cherries or drupes to ripen before proceeding to the harvest, picking at the same all the fruits on the branch. The branch is grabbed near the truck, pulled towards the picker, and the grains are separated and fall into the baskets or on the floor from where they are picked up, favoring the propagation of microbes, bacteria and mushrooms that go from the soil to the fruit, accelerating their fermentation. Another method is the mechanical one, using machines with two vertical brushes that pull off the fruit as well as many leaves. These last two methods of harvesting are detrimental to the good quality of the coffee that must proceed from cherries with a uniform maturity. If one were to let nature act freely allowing the cherries to mature on the branches, they would dry and in a few weeks, they would fall to the ground where the process would continue. After they would be picked, the peel and pulp already dried, one could remove the two grains that they enclose by breaking the outer cover. This simple process was probably used by the Arabs in remote times when they monopolized the cultivation and consumption of coffee, and from whom the Dutch learned. The Dutch perfected their method of harvesting in the XVIII century to create the WIB (West Indische Bereiding) that consists of peeling the cherries after the harvest to free the grains from the peel and the pulp, thus accelerating the drying process (“treatment by the humid way”), to obtain washed coffees. The other is the “treatment by the dry way” or “natural”, from which “natural” coffees are obtained. In Venezuela, the treatment by the humid way is generally used, particularly in the States of Táchira, Mérida, Trujillo, Portuguesa and Lara. One begins by “depulping” or “decherrying” to remove the pulp from the grain. Previously, the coffee has been deposited during less than 12 hours in a reception tank full of water where, because of the difference in weight, the good fruit (the heaviest) is separated from the vain fruit and other materials. Then comes the fermentation that consists in the elimination of the musilage (drivel) or “baba” adhered to the parchment. This is done in tanks where the grain remains between 14 and 20 hours, or until the grains scurry when taken by hand and squeezed. Following, the washing takes place: the coffee is beaten and washed mechanically or manually, using abundant water. Thus the rest of the musilage is removed from free sugars and phenols and vain coffee that float in the water. Then comes the drying of the coffee in parchment, done naturally, using solar energy in the drying yards, or mechanically, using dryers once the water adhered on the parchment is eliminated in a swivel or small tank. The stage of the paving-shinning takes place which means the peeling to eliminate the parchment and the shinning of the grain to eliminate the silver film. Then it is sacked in jute or sisal sacks to be marketed nationally and internationally. The coffee is then ready to be toasted. Now we come to the “torrefaction” (toasting), a pirolysis procedure which, by exposing the grains from room temperature to a temperature of 200 to 300°C during a period of 10 to 15 minutes, provokes important physical and chemical changes in them that make the preparation easier and improves the drink’s quality. Then the marvel occurs! When the grain’s cell wall breaks under the effect of pressure, the gas and volatile aromas are freed: the aromas are intensified during a certain period and then become less The aromas vary according to the temperature as well as the coffee’s taste: the bitterness increases while the acidity decreases. The clearest toasted coffees have an acidified taste while the darker ones will be more bitter. The history that results is synthesized in the cup where the coffee’s quality is verified. |
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 "That night The coffee plant blossomed. At dawn the blossomed branches Appeared And it seemed, under the shade Of the tall “guamos, As if all night It would have been snowing" Rómulo Gallegos  Recollection of cherries with the “picking” method.  Fermented coffee  Patio for drying the grain  Ground coffee filling machine, expresso type on paper, vacuumed  Café Imperial "Quality proven in the cup"  Café Imperial "Quality proven in the cup" |
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