Harvesting
In the third or fourth year after planting, the coffee tree blooms into small white flowers that resemble orange blossoms. These flowers last only a few days. The blossoms then die and are replaced by small green berries that within six to nine months ripen and are ready to be picked.

In some coffee-growing countries of the world, there may be three successive crops from each tree in a given year. In other areas, where coffee growing is much slower, there may be only one harvest or a major crop and an additional smaller crop. A coffee crop rarely ripens all at once. Harvesting is therefore a selective process. Berries that are ripe are usually hand picked from the branches, so that the unripe berries are able to mature. The sheer laboriousness called for in coffee-picking can be appreciated when one realizes that it takes some two thousand hand picked coffee cherries to produce one pound of roasted coffee cherries. An acre of coffee trees produces from four hundred to six hundred pounds of green coffee per year.

Brazil is the exception. A good deal of coffee is harvested by simply stripping the trees of all their fruit—ripe, unripe, and overripe—all at once. Leaves, twigs, and fruit are simply pulled off, thrown under the trees and collected for processing. This results in poor straight/varietal coffee, but Brazils find a large spot in the market for use in blending.

The cross-section of the coffee bean is something you should be somewhat familiar with for training purposes etc. The skin is the outermost layer of the bean. Next we find the pulp, and then the parchment. These layers are removed by the time the beans reach Millcreek and are ready to be roasted. The silverskin comes off during roasting and with all those layers gone, we are left with the bean.