Nine months after the bud first appears on a coffee plant, the cherry is ready for harvesting. Cherries ripen unevenly; each plant may be picked four or five times.
The red skin of the ripe cherry is removed by a machine. Cherries are sorted by size - the bigger ones go for export.
The sweet, slimy layer of mucus which covers the two coffee beans in each cherry is removed by soaking in water for 24 to 72 hours. Some coffee farms dry beans in the sun to reduce their moisture content from 50 per cent to 11 per cent; others use heated concrete tanks.
The humidity of the beans is measured. When the beans are dry enough, they are packed in hessian sacks and stored for three months. The final stage involves removing the hard white layer that surrounds the green beans. Some coffee farms roast their own but most export the green, unroasted bean.