Coffee grows on bushes in little green and red fruits called cherries. The coffee is ripe when the cherries turn dark red. After being picked and brought in the coffee begins the process of becoming the beans you buy in the store, but because I'm just making some for myself the process is a bit different.
Coffee is typically processed one of two ways, the wet method or the dry method.
For the wet method the coffee cherries are sorted and pressed in tanks of water and then either shelled by fermentation and washing or machine assisted wet processing. Both ways require specific equipment. Most Kona Coffees are processed in the wet method.
The dry method of processing coffee cherries is the oldest one. Whole coffee cherries are sorted and set out to dry on a flat plane or concrete and regularly rotated until their skins come off leaving the rest of the fruit.
Having tried to take off the skin the dry method last year without success (they all rotted) I am practicing neither the wet nor the dry method. Because I only picked one bowl of cherries, there are few enough to simply mash the cherries with a potato masher and pop the beans out by hand.
The beans are free of their skin and pulp and what can be seen now is the white, slimy pectin layer of the coffee. I set these out to dry in the sun for a few days.
(I hope this works. I've never heard of anyone doing it this way before...)
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