A few years ago I had a thought lock in my brain that wouldn’t go. You know what I mean, one of those things…it just sticks there and you can’t get it out. You wake up and it’s there. Go to work and it’s there. That omnipresent question you don’t have the answer to and don’t know where to find it.
So the question racking my brain was…well, before I tell you let me lay further groundwork. I’m sure most of you have heard of the coffee Kopi Luwak. If you haven’t the story goes like this. Kopi Luwak coffee is made from the seeds of coffee cherries which have been eaten by the Asian Palm Civet and then passed through its digestive tract. A civet eats the berries for their fleshy pulp and supposedly only selects the ripest sweetest cherries. That, along with the purported unique enzymes in its digestive process, creates a rare and expensive coffee.
So I have a friend and customer that comes into JP’s all the time who travels regularly to Indonesia. He brought back some Kopi and we French pressed some at the store and chatted for a bit. He told me something that added fodder to my question – and of course shows human nature and ingenuity. There are farmers in Indonesia that have caged civets they feed coffee cherries to. Kind of live mini manufacturing plants to produce some very profitable coffee. Thing is, they can’t always get their hands on the ripe coffee cherries they’d like to, so they’ve come up with a solution; spread sweet overripe banana mush on the cherries, so the civets will eat them. So, if the civets are eating cherries because of sweet overripe bananas rather than being “perfectly ripe cherries” doesn’t that defeat much of the supporting argument for Kopi Luwak’s claim to fame of civets eating only the ripest cherries?
Which brings me back to my question; is there a perfect point at which the cherry is at its ripest and will contain the most potential for the best coffee in the cup? And along with that, how far away from ripe, either too green (under-ripe) or too ripe (over-ripe) will picking a cherry affect the potential for great coffee? So I asked that question of a roaster/friend that I know well and here is his answer.
“For quality sake, as opposed to there being a certain point – for arguments sake let’s say a perfect day – that the cherry is perfectly ripe and will yield the finest coffee, there is really more of a timeline with a parabolic curve of which you can use coffee from point “a” to point “b” and get great coffee.“ (*see my chart below).
In the chart you see a timeline representing coffee from green to rotten (I’d like to have made it more green to yellow to light red to red to deep red to overly red to rotten, but I’m not a coffee farm owner). I’ve pointed an arrow to what I would present as “the perfect moment” where the coffee cherry is perfectly red and ripe and will yield the “perfect” coffee. Also, I’ve pointed to a span that represents a period of time (a number of days) that more accurately shows the fact there is a period of some days where the coffee cherries are ripe and ready to yield the best end result.
To complicate my thoughts on this even more, there was an article in the latest Barista Magazine (April-May 2011) about Aida Battle, a coffee framer from El Salvador. In the article it says the following,
“(Aida) says that when she left her perfectly happy life in the States back then to live in El Salvador and manage the family farms, she instructed the pickers to pluck only red ripe cherries because, well, that’s just what made sense. She didn’t know any better – mixing some of the unripes and imperfections in order to get a higher yield just didn’t occur to her as an option. So she came away from her first harvest with impeccable coffee almost by accident.” (highlights mine)
After reading this a couple thoughts came to mind. First, was it that easy for her to go from substandard or standard coffee to, “some of the finest coffees to ever come out of the country“ (Barista magazine article) and a 1st and 16th place finish in the 2003 Cup of Excellence competition? WOW! Just by picking only “the red ripe cherries” instead of including the unripe and overripe ones?
I think I know enough about coffee to say that there is more to great coffee than simply using the ripe cherries, but my question still remains – is there a certain day or moment at which coffee cherries have the potential to produce the pinacle of their potential or is it a period of time?
I would love comments from coffee farmers, as well as thoughts or experiences from roasters or experts in coffee agriculture.
Comments anyone??
4 Comments
I would like to hear some responses also, most roasters will have a set of guidelines that they will use to accept beans, and they may never see the cherries, just the beans after they’re separated.
Of course, this is a question that can be applied to most all agricultural products, at what point is it acceptable to harvest and bring the crop to the customer, and what is the absolute “peak” or best time to get the best result possible.
Being a mostly hand picked product, I would assume it’s easier for coffee farmers to pick cherries at a certain point in development, so maybe you would have to go all the way back to them to get a answer, what is acceptable to them and why.
And unlike other products (ex. fried green tomatoes, or apple cider) that have uses at different points in their cycle, I would assume that there is only one optimum period to pick coffee cherries for use.
It isn’t quite that simple. First, pickers are usually paid by the pound. If the farmer only pays for red-ripe beans the pickers (at least the good ones) are going to work at other farms that pay for green. yellow, purple, brown and black beans. Second, farms don’t pick the same tree every day. So what is almost ripe today is either picked or passed over and will be purple or brown at the next picking. Third, pickers don’t look at the back of the coffee cherry. It is common for a cherry that looks ripe to have a green, yellow, brown or black back side.
So the famer who wants ripe coffee pays a premium for picking fruit as ripe as possible and/or sorts the fruit after it is picked. In third world countries, farmers can pay sorters a dollar or two a day and can afford hand sorting. The long term answer is probably mechanical sorting like blueberries.
Karen Paterson recently posted..Which Coffee Filter is Best for Hula Daddy Kona Coffee?
Thanks Karen, you seem to have a lot of experience. Are you a farm owner?
Yes, We own Hula Daddy Kona Coffee in Kona Hawaii. Sorry ti took so long to answer.