YOUR HONEY PROCESS COFFEE: FROM SEED TO DRYING
Like washed or natural process coffee, your honey process coffee also starts out as seedlings, which take 3-4 years to become coffee-producing trees.
Beans grow inside cherry-like fruit. After four years of growing to maturity, each tree can produce 1-1.5 pounds of coffee, depending on the resources a farmer has to dedicate to her coffee. Harvests are just once a year.
For maximum sweetness and development, only the reddest coffee cherries should be picked, leaving green ones for another day.
Picked coffee cherries are placed in a big cement funnel, which we fill with water to remove imperfections, which float and are scooped off. Then good coffee fruit falls down an opening in the funnel to a "depulper" machine.
The "depulper" separates the outside fruit from the beans inside. They are squeezed through a narrow passage wider than a bean but smaller than the fruit.
Instead of fermenting & washing coffee, for honey process we dry it with the sweet, naturally-occuring honey-like layer outside each bean, some of which penetrates the bean, giving it a taste similar to honey!
To prevent fermentation, we must move honey process coffee every 12 minutes at first until it dries in the sun.
Traceability of every lot is maintained. We mark every single bag with the variety, producer's name, and lot number.
After drying, coffee is stored in a warehouse for a minimum of one month so moisture levels in each bean distribute evenly (without this step, coffee tastes grassy or chalky). Next comes dry hulling.