Once they are ripe (bright red, fleshy cherry) the cherries are harvested. They are hand-picked one by one as they ripen, required repeated picking passes, or they all stripped (with or without special mechanical aids) together, ripe and non-ripe cherries which are sorted later.

The cherries are then processed to get to the fruit enclosed in the flesh. The fruit of the coffee cherry is one or two semi-oval beans covered in a very fine silver skin and a thin membrane, the parchment.

One of two methods is generally used for this process.

The first, called the wet method, involves pulping the cherry flesh using special machines, then immersing the cherries in tanks of water where the fleshy residue is loosened by fermentation. Then the beans are dried in the sun and, lastly, milled to remove the parchment. In the next phase the beans are sorted through a series of increasingly fine sieves and then sorted again by hand or using electronic sensors. This process produces washed coffees.

The other is called the dry method. The cherries are spread on the ground and dried in the sun for about two to three weeks; they are raked regularly to ensure that all the cherries are exposed to the sun. Then the dried cherries are de-pulped using mechanical hullers, after which they are ready for sorting and selection.

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