Do Hand Picked Cherry Beans Lead To A Better-Quality Coffee?

Production of the best quality coffee requires several careful processing steps. A delightful specialty coffee needs distinction and special care at each step of the production and supply chain.  There are countless steps and decisions from seed to cup whose true potential is determined by extensive research and experimentation. The first step for transferring cherries to our cup is harvesting. The final coffee product should be made from the ripest cherries.

Hand picking and mechanical picking are the two commonly used methods for the harvesting of cherry beans. Coffee producers can mechanically strip harvest the cherries or opt hand pick mechanism. The selected method affects the social impact, production cost, and quality of the final coffee product. In hand-picking mechanisms, only fully ripened cherry beans are picked manually by the labor and filled in the baskets hung around their waist while the mechanical method involves all beans stripping in a single move by machine regardless. In the mechanical method, all the cherry beans are picked whether these are ripened or unripened.

Hand picking of the cherry beans leads to the production of better-quality coffee in comparison to the mechanical picking beans product. In hand picked method, only the fully ripened cherries are picked with a chance of minimum harvesting of unripened beans that’s the most important for the quality of the final coffee product.

Moreover, the quality of coffee is significantly influenced by the texture, size, and shape of the raw beans. Hand picking provides much better control on these parameters in comparison to mechanical picking, hence resulting in better quality coffee. In contrast, in mechanical stripping, as discussed earlier, the cherry beans are stripped by the machines regardless of the ripening stage that results in the lower quality final product as opposed to the hand-picked cherries product.

The proven, all-natural coffee-farming techniques of 1888 Coffee used to cultivate the evergreen coffee plants have been refined and perfected over more than 75 years. To this day, coffee beans are handpicked and gently roasted in small batches to produce the premium coffees offered by the 1888 Coffee Company.