Picking & Processing
For this post on Ninety Plus Gesha Estate (NPGE) I am going to focus on two critical processes on the farm: Picking and processing. Coffee producers spend months and years devoted to preparing their land for coffee, choosing specific varieties, and building infrastructure. Once harvest begins, the time scale narrows. Now days and hours are measures of time and precision and data collection are the keys to unravelling the best practices that will produce exceptional coffee for that particular farm.
Picking coffee only when the cherry (coffee fruit) is ripe is essential to coffee quality. Coffees produced from ripe cherry are sweeter, more complex, and have more intense and vibrant flavors. Sound great, right? Just pick the red ones! Unfortunately, picking only ripe cherry is a laborious and expensive process. It is laborious because cherry might look ripe on one side, but have areas of under ripe fruit on the other. It is expensive because coffee doesn’t ripen all at once so pickers have to pass by each tree multiple times during the harvest and producers have to pay coffee pickers more per pound because the pickers volumes are lower. Ninety Plus Gesha Estates invests very heavily in picking. They train their pickers and pay these pickers high wages. The results show in both the vibrant, deep reds of the freshly picked cherries and in the extraordinary flavours showcased on the cupping tables. It also had an unforeseen benefit: Ninety Plus is slowly developing a reputation in Panama as a farm that you want to work for and migrant pickers return year after year.
This year, Joseph has taken an additional step in picking by having the pickers do additional sorting in the fields to further separate the ripe cherry. Now each day’s harvest is from a specific plot and is separated into varying stages of ripeness. The results are fascinating. First, this additional separation greatly improved some of the first harvest lots. First harvest coffee generally is not exported because the cherry is unevenly ripened and developed too fast to transfer sweetness and complexity to the bean. Last year, Ninety Plus wouldn’t have had exportable coffee that early in the harvest; this year I tasted a coffee from the very first part of harvest that is so good that Ninety Plus is keeping it as a separate micro-lot. By improving sorting, they added months and multiple batches to their harvest. This separation is also revealing how different stages of the harvest react to their different processing methods.
Over the last three years, Ninety Plus Gesha Estates performed countless experiments with processing. They record and catalogue these methods and are slowly building a roster of different taste profiles the span the flavour spectrum of coffee. At the moment, NPGE has five flavour profile designations that are different expressions of their of their washed, honeyed, and natural processed gesha: Lycello, Juliette, Perci, Silvia, and Lotus. These different profiles highlight something important for me that I didn’t fully consider before: We cannot accurately categorize coffee flavour profiles using only the three well known processing categories. The industry has already started acknowledging this with honey-processed coffees in Costa Rica. Initially there was just honey processing. Over time this process was developed and now there is white, yellow, and red honey processing. Each of these names designates not only a method (how much mucilage is left on the coffee), but also an anticipated flavour profile. Variations in washed and naturally processed coffees do not have the same type of easy classification and as a result they are often painted with a broad brush by baristas and consumers, but this is changing on farms! For example, I tasted naturally processed coffees at NPGE that I thought were washed coffees because of the delicate flavours and squeaky clean acidity. More and more farmers are experimenting with processing and refining their processing methods to their farm’s unique terroir. I believe that the longer that this goes on, the less value broad terms like “washed “ and “natural” will hold for classifying coffee’s flavors, unless we add additional qualifying terms. NPGE’s flavour designations are one potential answer to this problem and also a great example of the diverse, often unexplored flavour profiles that exist beyond the three classic processing methods.
It would be remiss to talk the vision of NPGE and initiatives on the farm without mentioning the many, many people that live and work at NPGE. I will discuss this in my final Panama post!
