What is Wet Washed Coffee?
Wet Washed Coffee
From harvesting to roasting, coffee beans have to undergo a long process in order to bring that steaming cup of joe to your table. For this process to begin, the coffee beans have to first be harvested from the coffee plant. Each coffee cherry is plucked for the individual beans that are enclosed inside. In order for the bean to be considered as “processed” it has to be removed from the cherry, dried, and prepared to be roasted.
The goal of this process is to remove all of the sticky flesh before it's dried. The wet washed process is a long road to get the raw coffee beans to be ready for roasting and eventually packaged and sold to the customer.
What is the wet washed process?
In short, this process uses water to prepare the coffee beans for sale. After the coffee cherries are harvested, they are placed in a foliation tank where the ripe berries sink and moved to the next steps while the unripe beans are removed. Then fruit flesh is separated from the rest of the cherries by a machine. When each of the beans have been removed from their outer layers, the coffee beans are poured into a drainage pipe filled with water that ferments each coffee bean. After this phase, the coffee is washed once again to remove any remaining waste before moved to the drying process. After the coffee beans are washed, they sent to sunbathe for a couple of days and then separated once again when fully dry.
The wet washed processing plays a very crucial role in the life span of the coffee bean. But as you can imagine, this process uses a lot of water which raises environmental concerns.
