Two main processing methods of coffee

At the coffee production sites (farms and estates), two different main methods of processing are used to obtain intermediate products that will subsequently be treated in exactly the same way to provide the coffee beans of commerce.

These methods are dry processing, which produces dried cherry coffee and wet processing, which produces (dry) parchment coffee. Dry processing is generally used for Robusta coffee, but is also used in Brazil for the majority of Arabica coffees. Wet processing, on the other, hand, is used for Arabica and results in so-called mild coffee, when fermentation is included in the preparation process. Dry processing is very simple and, most important of all, is less demanding in respect of harvesting, since all the berries or cherries are dried immediately after harvest. In contrast, wet processing requires more strict control of the harvesting as unripe berries or berries that have partly dried on the tree cannot be handled by the pulping machines.

After drying, the processing stages (or so-called curing) of dried cherry coffee and parchment coffee are very similar, differences lying in details of the equipment used to remove the remaining outer coverings from the green coffee beans, size grading and colourimetric sorting