Coffee Glossary · Processing
Hand Sorting
The final human quality gate: workers — overwhelmingly women, at origin after origin — picking defective beans, husk, and foreign matter from green coffee moving past on belts or spread on tables, catching what machines miss. Color sorters remove what optics can see; hands remove what judgment can see. High-spec lots may pass sorting lines twice or three times. The step is labor-intensive and costly, which is why triple-picked lots command premiums, and why defect counts advertise the labor behind them.
Related terms
Defects (Green Coffee)
Physical faults in green coffee counted under grading systems like the SCA's: category 1 (primary) defects —…
Quakers
Unripe beans that sneak through sorting and refuse to roast properly — staying pale tan while their…
Grading (Green Coffee)
The classification of green coffee into commercial tiers by measurable criteria — screen size, defect count,…
Decaffeination (Swiss Water, EA, CO2)
Industrial removal of caffeine from green coffee before roasting, targeting 97%+ extraction. Leading methods:…
Hulling
The dry-mill step that strips the parchment husk (or, for naturals, the entire dried cherry shell) from green…
Mucilage
The sticky, sugar-rich fruit layer clinging to parchment after the cherry's skin is pulped away. What happens…
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