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Wet Processing
This system is much more expensive, due to
far greater requirements of equipment, labor, time and water. Before any
fermentation can begin in the freshly picked cherries, they are
immediately washed in large tanks from which the water carries them into
a system of channels. Staying in contact with the fresh-flowing water
helps to loosen the outer skin, while the cherries are carried towards a
de-pulping machine. Here they lose their skin and some of the pulp, but
the flowing water takes the beans, still wearing their parchment
covering and a lot of the sticky mucilage, through various screens,
sieves and sluices, which further sort the beans by size and weight.
At last the beans arrive in a
fermentation tank, where any remaining mucilage is broken down by natural
enzymes during a 36-hour soak. The fermentation is monitored and
controlled, as it must only remove the mucilage and not develop
off-flavors in the beans themselves. The parchment beans, once clear of
mucilage, are rinsed, drained and spread out on patios or wire-mesh
platforms, and left to dry in the sun.
As the dry method, the parchment beans
are turned and raked for between one and two weeks, or they may go into
low-temperature drying machines, until their moisture content is about
11-12 percent: the last stages are critical because over-drying makes
them brittle and they can lose quality; under-drying means vulnerability
to unwanted fermentation, fungi and bacteria or bruising during
subsequent hulling. Parchment beans are stored for about a month, and
can be stored for several months in a controlled atmosphere. When
exportation is imminent, the beans are taken to the curing mill where
the parchment is removed by hulling, and the washed beans undergo the
same processes as do the dry-processed beans.
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