Harvesting and storage

Harvest of the crop is the completion of the production cycle and the end of a growing season.
Depending on the variety, it will take approximately 3 or 4 years for the newly planted  coffee trees to begin to bear fruit. The fruit, called the coffee cherry, turns a bright,  deep red when it is ripe and ready to be harvested.  In most countries, the coffee  crop is picked by hand, a labor-intensive and difficult process, though in places like  Brazil, where the landscape is relatively flat and the coffee fields immense, the  process has been mechanized. Whether picked by hand or by machine, all coffee  is harvested in one of two ways:

Strip Picked - the entire crop is harvested at one time. This can either be done by  machine or by hand.  In either case, all of the cherries are stripped off of the branch  at one time.

 

Selectively Picked - only the ripe cherries are harvested and they are picked  individually by hand. Pickers rotate among the trees every 8 - 10 days, choosing  only the cherries which are at the peak of ripeness. Because this kind of harvest is  labor intensive, and thus more costly, it is used primarily to harvest the finer arabica  beans.

In most coffee-growing countries, there is one major harvest a year; though in  countries like Colombia, where there are two flowerings a year, there is a main and  secondary crop. A good picker averages approximately 100 to 200 pounds of coffee cherry a day,  which will produce 20 to 40 pounds of coffee beans. At the end of a day of picking,  each worker's harvest is carefully weighed and each picker is paid on the merit of his or her work. The day's harvest is then combined and transported to the processing plant.

Storage
Before being exported, the coffee beans will be even more precisely sorted by size and weight. They will also be closely evaluated for color flaws or other imperfections.
Typically, the bean size is represented on a scale of 10 to 20. The number represents the size of a round hole's diameter in terms of 1/64's of an inch. A number 10 bean would be the approximate size of a hole in a diameter of 10/64 of an inch and a number 15 bean, 15/64 of an inch. Beans are sized by being passed through a series of different sized screens. They are also sorted pneumatically by using an air jet to separate heavy from light beans.

Next defective beans are removed.  Though this process can be accomplished by sophisticated machines, in many countries, it is done by hand while the beans move along an electronic conveyor belt.  Beans of unsatisfactory size, color, or that are otherwise unacceptable, are removed. This might include over-fermented beans, those with insect damage or that are unhulled. In many countries, this process is done both by machine and hand, insuring that only the finest quality coffee beans are exported. When the beans are checked, they will be stored mostly in bags of 50 kg each.