HULLING YOUR COFFEE & EXPORTING TO NORTH AMERICA & BEYOND
After raised bed or patio drying and rest in the warehouse for moisture distribution, your coffee still has a paper-thin "parchment" layer that must be removed before it is shipped to you.
This is a "huller," which removes the "hull" (paper-thin parchment layer) from around each bean.
After the parchment is removed, giant sieves separate extraneous material and beans that are too small or too big. This is also how we separate out peaberries if we would like (fused, round beans).
Next, vibrating classifiers use gravity to separate beans that are hollow inside as well as other imperfections.
Here you can see how the vibrating classifier effectively separates out bad beans from good beans, but our work is not done yet!
We use light sensors to remove even more imperfections from your coffee!
We use a computer touch screen to tell the light-sensor machine which defects to remove with puffs of air. Even beans with pin-sized holes & over-fermented or discolored beans can be removed.
If any imperfections make it through the above processes, a room full of people pick remaining bad beans out on conveyor belts. We use this process several times until we are as close to 0% imperfections as possible.
Finally, the beans go up a conveyor belt into this huge funnel, which we use to fill up bags for export in shipping containers.
Loaded with your coffee, trucks drive the shipping containers to the port.
The containers go through customs, are loaded on a ship, are offloaded in North America, and go through customs again.
Then, finally, the coffee is brought to a warehouse in N. America, where it is distributed on trucks to coffee roasters in N. America or sent on pallets anywhere in the world.
Last, you (coffee roasters) receive the coffee and roast it to perfection, taking care to maintain all the hard work we've done on our farm, with partner producers, and shipping internationally.
Thanks for taking this international journey with us! We are happy to give public presentations about this amazing process for roasters with whom we work and their customers.