11 Minutes read
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By Ali Johnston
North America Lab Coordinator
The harvesting of coffee cherry is a labor-intensive process that also requires an extraordinary amount of precision. Coffee farmers continually battle the same conundrum: Should they harvest higher yields, including overripe and under-ripe cherries, at the risk of producing a potentially lower quality? Or should they harvest lower yields, picking only perfectly ripe cherries, at a potentially higher quality? This productivity-versus-quality debate is a constant in the life of a coffee farmer.
Caravela Coffee sought to find some solutions to this ongoing issue and posed the following questions:
- Can cup quality be maintained or even improved by allowing varying degrees of ripeness within the middle of the color spectrum?
- Is it possible to save coffee farmers time and money through identifying a range of acceptable ripeness levels and bypassing the selective picking stage?