Our Coffee

The Coffee Journey

Coffee is a tropical plant thus has a very narrow temperature range, not too hot or too cold.
It grows in a range of soil types, preferring the more acidic soils that have good drainage.
Regular pruning is necessary to keep a productive tree.
Though it can take a little stress, too much wind could damage the leaves and flowers reducing the likeliness of fruit forming.

Coffee fruits are usually red when ripe though can be orange pink or yellow on some varieties.
The coffee trees fruit takes 7-8 months to ripen.
The best time to harvest the bean is when the fruit is a cherry red.
When ripe it can be harvested, human hands or machines can be used to shake the trees forcing the tree to drop it's fruit

Once the coffee has been collected it then gets sorted between ripe and unripe fruit.
Yellow fruits haven't matured enough black fruits have matured too much.
Other visual defects can be sorted at this stage.

Once ripe the outer cases must be removed this can be through a number of processes such as wet processing or dry processing.
The cleaning process aims to remove the Silverskin, Parchment and Mucilage.
Dry processing: Once dry a specially designed machine is used to remove the fruits skin simultaneously.
Wet processing: Normally the Mucilage is removed straight away by machine by coaxing microorganisms to eat it. The bean still covered by the Silverskin and parchment is then dried in the sun or in a forced-air dryer.

A hard greenish bluish bean is left of varying sizes.
Some beans may be broken and must be sorted to separate between the malformed, diseased-damaged seeds and residing insects. this can be done by humans or machines.
The seeds are separated by size, density and colour.

Once this very long process is complete they are bagged ready to be shipped.
They will be stored in a warehouse or shipped directly to a roastery such as Masteroast.
Once roasted the beans can be ground, brewed and drunk.

A small list of countries that we source our coffee from.