Education Time - Processing
Coffee comes to you in a paper/plastic cup, or a ceramic mug. Tastes good. But how did it go from being a bright red cherry to the wisened noir that you mull over, measuring out your life with coffee spoons? The first steps in any coffee-making extravaganza - picking and processing - are dynamic and vital enough to break the flagging spirits of an urban sprawl and endow some epicurean appreciation, so it's good to give them a second/third/ad-infinitum thought. Right now we're going to be focusing on processing, the three ways that coffee seeds can be processed, and the effect it has on the coffee in hand. To help us along the way, we have some visual aids from our trip to Las Lajas, Costa Rica, back in 2013.
Processing is the stage that takes place after coffee cherries are picked and before they're rested and sent on to a roaster. To give you a sense of the coffee cherry in coffee-cherry format, here's Maciej (Director of Coffee) and Greg (Gregory) with their loot following from an hour of cherry-picking:
As you can see, sunglasses were necessary when handling those riper-than-a-life-calling cherries.
After picking, we have three choices to play with: do we want our coffee seeds to be 1. washed 2. natural, or 3. pulped-natural? This is the primary question behind processing and the one we're going to focus on. Here's a run-down as to what these options entail:
1. When a coffee seed is referred to as 'washed' it has undergone a four-part process. First, the skin of the cherry is removed; second, the remaining pulp/mucilage is fermented and washed away. Then comes drying. After drying, the thin layer of parchment and silverskin are removed.
Washed coffee characteristics: washed coffees tend to have a lighter body, cleaner flavor, and sharper acidity.
2. When the coffee seed is 'natural', it's left to dry with the skin and pulp still on. It then plays catch up as skin, pulp, parchment and silverskin are removed after drying.
Natural coffee characteristics: natural coffees have wilder flavors, more of a jammy sweetness, less acidity and more body. It's often hard to find a natural coffee with the kind of balance that a washed coffee possesses, but when you do it's an exciting prospect.
The naturally-processed 'Perla Negra' out to dry - cool beans.
3. The final option has that Yeatsian appeal of being caught between contraries like the sun and moon - the process of the Celtic twilight if there ever was one; the pulp-natural process. Neither natural or washed, it's somewhere inbetween. The skin is removed but some pulp is left on the cherry before drying, attaching some extrinsic flavor development but not as much as you'd get through natural processing.
Pulp-natural coffee characteristics: between definitions by definition, its qualities are about halfway between those of washed and natural coffees.
Pulp-natural, catching rays for the second day.
So which process is best? That's a question with no definitive answer. Coffee is a sensory delight and ever-changing experiment. It's more than the crest and fall of a wave, finding its inevitable flatline; it's tubular in the most 70s sense of always far-out, alternating and ever-present. Take, for example, our current stock of Borboya - we had a batch last year that Maciej called a "total peach-bomb". Now it's back at our aeropress bar - same farm, same process (washed), same roaster (George Howell) - but this time the lemon/lavender/green-tea flavor notes have taken the foreground. Different but still delicious. So who's to tell if certain processing methods are better/worse than others when the same variety can take on such ... variety? You, your nose, your taste buds. Groovy.
On a final note, here's a picture that gives some clout to the term terroir; Las Lajas lies on the slopes of Poas Volcano and as such provided us with some views not easily - certainly not desirably - forgotten:
Volcano Coffee > Not-Volcano Coffee