How to Process a Coffee Plant From Tree To Delicious Cup

A delicious cup of coffee is a luxury many of us can’t do without. This tropical beauty (the coffee plant) has us wrapped around her little finger from the first sip to the last drop. 

Now that I live in the tropics, I’ve jumped in with both feet to grow a coffee plant and process the beans. Today, I’ll show you how I do it. Now, we didn’t process our coffee plant the easy way. I deliberately didn’t look up all the labor-saving ways to process coffee, much to my wife Rachel’s chagrin. Instead, I decided to do it all by hand.

It started with harvesting the coffee cherries from the coffee plant we discovered in the cocoa orchard.

Watch the video. (Length: 8:47 min)

After that, there are four distinct phases to processing the beans from the coffee plant.

1. Harvest the fruit from the coffee plant
2. Remove the coffee beans from the fruit
3. Ferment/clean the coffee beans
4. Dry the coffee beans
5. Remove the “parchment” layer from the dry beans
6. Roast and grind the beans

I created a couple of videos showing the whole process. You can watch the two-part long version or the short version.

In Part One, we remove the coffee beans from the fruit and start the fermentation process. (Length: 18:29 min)

We did this all by hand, so it was a rather time-consuming process. Using your teeth is not necessarily recommended but works much better than any implement I’ve found, unless you do it the easy way and smash with a big board, like this (Length: 1:43 min):

In Part Two, we show the final process from drying to roasting. (Length: 17:39 min)

If you’re short on time, watch the short version. I demonstrate the whole process from coffee plant to cup in 2.5 minutes:

And, just because…I’m sure you have a cup of coffee close at hand. Have a little fun with the Hip-Hop version!

There’s really no excuse for the rap, but I guess you could call it “edutainment.”

Can’t handle the caffeine in coffee? Try some Dandelion Coffee.

A few years ago, I did a post sharing the entire process as a Hawaiian couple does it.

Sounds like fun and you get coffee?! That’s a win-win! So are you going to try to grow your own coffee plant? Tell us in the comments below.

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David The Good

David The Good is a Grow Network Change Maker, a gardening expert, and the author of five books you can find on Amazon: Compost Everything: The Good Guide to Extreme Composting, Grow or Die: The Good Guide to Survival Gardening, Totally Crazy Easy Florida Gardening, Create Your Own Florida Food Forest, and Push the Zone: The Good Guide to Growing Tropical Plants Beyond the Tropics. Find fresh gardening inspiration at his website TheSurvivalGardener.com and be sure to follow his popular YouTube channel.

www.TheSurvivalGardener.com