May 23 2011
Green Coffee Beans
Green coffee beans & roasted coffee beans
Green coffee beans are becoming a popular coffee product among coffee drinkers. These are coffee beans that have not been roasted and are not yet ready to brew a pot of coffee. The advantage to these beans is there ability to stay fresh for a long time, up to a year in or longer in cool, dry storage. This is much longer than a roasted coffee bean will stay fresh. Coffee drinkers who decide to purchase green coffee beans must be planning on roasting them or taking them to a roaster. If they are not roasted they cannot be used to make a pot of coffee.
Green coffee beans have been through several parts of the processing stages but not the roasting. The cherries as the beans are called when first picked have to be processed to remove the fleshy red part of the fruit. This can be done through a wet or a dry process. This is called using a washed or unwashed process. The unwashed process is also called the natural process.
After the fleshy part of the cherry is removed the beans must be dried and have the outer skin or parchment removed before they are ready for roasting. The drying process can take several weeks if they are dried naturally in the sun or they can be dried in commercial driers which make the process much faster. Many coffee plantations are reverting to the natural process simply to take the coffee bean processing back to a natural form without mechanical intervention.
After the green coffee beans have dried and all the parchment is removed the beans are manually cleaned to remove twigs and separate them by grade. Beans are graded according to quality of size and shape. Irregular or cracked beans are graded lower and will not demand the higher price that perfectly formed, larger beans will fetch.
At this point the beans are ready to be sold as green coffee beans to people who want to roast their own coffee or they are shipped off to roasters who process them further for commercial distribution. As more people turn to roasting their own coffee beans many coffee plantations are creating an Internet presence in order to sell their coffee beans directly to the consumer.
This direct relationship between the coffee plantation and the consumer cuts out the middle man for both parties. It is a win-win situation in which the plantation makes money directly from the consumer and the consumer doesn’t pay a marked up price due the beans being handled by a third party. This relationship will continue to proliferate as more consumers learn to roast their own coffee and prefer to deal directly with the coffee plantation to purchase their coffee beans.
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