Trouble At mill?

A lack of access to quality wet mills can hamper the production of speciality coffee. But, as Phil Wain discovers, there are solutions

- Phil Wain

You may not have heard of wet milling, but it is a crucial process in the production of high-quality washed coffee. Harvested coffee cherries are fed into a pulping machine, which separates the bean from the fruit that surrounds it. The beans are sorted and then kept for anything from eight to 72 hours in fermentation tanks, where the sticky mucilage around the coffee beans is broken down. The beans are then washed to remove the mucilage; this washed coffee is known as parchment.

Parchment is slowly dried – often on raised beds – while workers continually turn it in the sun. There is also a later stage – dry milling – when the last layers of dry skin are removed from the parchment coffee as it is cleaned and sorted before being shipped. 

Of course, this is a generalisation – the process varies from region to region and country to country. But on the whole it is a large scale industrial process carried out by cooperatives, exporters or service providers. 

Poor access

Access to good wet mills is a major factor in improving the quality of coffee and coffee farmers’ income. If we want quality coffee where the farmer has access to adequate processing of the picked coffee and full traceability, we need coffee growers to have access to decent wet mills. But unfortunately in many parts of the coffee growing world, good mills are scarce and/or inaccessible.