You arrive at Syra and are greeted by your usual barista: "Good morning, the same as always", or maybe this time you prepare your coffee at home with your preferred method.

No matter what the situation is, many times we do not take the time to think that the quality of a good cup of coffee always begins with a good coffee picker who has invested hours in choosing the best beans from each coffee tree.

But enough of introductions, and as the collectors would say: Let's get down to business!

Workers or craftsmen?

When the harvest season approaches in different parts of the world, the farms are filled with workers who begin an exhausting task: picking coffee beans by hand, bean by bean.

This is the beginning of cups of the highest level, and it is a hard work that influences the other processes and the tasting, since being a manual procedure it is the responsibility of each worker to select the ripe fruits and separate them from the defective cherries.

They are in charge of extracting the coffee cherries and selecting them for the pulping process, which consists of separating the fleshy part of the fruit from the coffee bean. For this reason it is very important to make sure that the coffee cherries are not too green or too ripe for their production.

Collect and repeat

Coffee has varied flowering stages, which means that the same branch must be harvested at various times throughout the harvest; this means that there are several harvests in which a meticulous selection must be made with care and skill in order to take the ripe bean in a limited time, ensuring the yield of the day.

During the harvest season, the plants must be visited on several occasions to guarantee that only the ripe beans are harvested and to ensure that there is enough time to complete the seasoning of the last beans. This process requires several weeks in order to make two to three trips through the bushes and between the streets of the same coffee plantation.

Specialty coffee specialists

All coffee beans are classified up to 100, in a cupping process established by the SCA (Specialty Coffee Association), where it is determined that specialty coffee must be of the Arabica varietal and with a cup score of 80 or more points. The coffees that reach specialty status have very few defects or none at all.

Pickers usually know what a perfectly ripe cherry looks like, as working in the coffee plantations for hundreds of hours means that they are probably the best informed people to know what a good cherry looks like, and therefore what a good cup will be like.

Anonymous Stars

In the crops of Central and South America the pickers are known as "bombs" and in a single day they can collect 100 to 150 kilos of coffee. It is thanks to them and thousands of others around the world that we can enjoy a good specialty coffee every day. They represent a fundamental link in the production chain, and their work requires experience and training.

Perhaps the best way to thank them is to always buy coffee of origin, since in this way we will be guaranteeing their growth and supporting their work in a fair way.