Coffee Glossary · Processing
Washing Station (Wet Mill)
The facility where fresh cherry becomes parchment coffee: reception and flotation, pulping, fermentation tanks, washing channels, and drying beds. In East Africa and Laos alike, washing stations aggregate cherry from hundreds of smallholder families and apply uniform quality control — which is why station names (Kenyan 'factories,' Rwandan stations, Bolaven mills) function as quality brands. The station model lets tiny farms reach specialty standards no household processing could achieve consistently.
Related terms
Wet Mill vs Dry Mill
Coffee's two processing stages, often in different places: the wet mill (washing station) handles fresh…
Mucilage
The sticky, sugar-rich fruit layer clinging to parchment after the cherry's skin is pulped away. What happens…
Parchment (Pergamino)
The papery protective husk around each coffee seed, exposed after pulping and retained through drying in…
Decaffeination (Swiss Water, EA, CO2)
Industrial removal of caffeine from green coffee before roasting, targeting 97%+ extraction. Leading methods:…
Hand Sorting
The final human quality gate: workers — overwhelmingly women, at origin after origin — picking defective…
Hulling
The dry-mill step that strips the parchment husk (or, for naturals, the entire dried cherry shell) from green…
Reading up before buying? Volcana Coffee exports SGS-inspected specialty Arabica and Fine Robusta from the Bolaven Plateau, Laos — and we're happy to walk new importers through every term on a real offer sheet.
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