Much like us, coffee begins it life in a nursery. After a year of careful nurturing, the young coffee seedlings are planted, most often in regions with warm days and cool nights, with the best beans being grown at high altitudes. From picking to roasting, farmers put the coffee through a variety of stages including depulping, fermenting, cleaning, drying and storing. These processes require much skill, dedication and passion on the part of the farmers to ensure the bean is 'raised' to the highest quality possible.
Coffee beans come from the fruit of a coffee plant called a cherry.
Each cherry contains two beans, which are actually seeds, surrounded by several protective layers and an outer pulp. The coffee harvest begins with farmers hand- picking the ripe cherries. The beans are then removed from the fruit using either the wet or dry processing method. For most of the coffee in Latin America, this is done using the 'wet' process. First the farmer separates the beans from the flesh of the fruit by passing the cherry through a hand operated machine called a 'depulper'.