(7% vs. 3.5%). Robusta varieties didn’t
become prominent until the end of the 19th
century, when their disease resistance became
important in Indonesia and elsewhere.
Dry and Wet Processing To prepare coffee
beans, the ripe coffee berries are picked from
the trees, and the seeds cleaned of the fruit
pulp by one of two basic methods. In the dry
method, the berries are left in the sun to dry,
or first piled to ferment for a few days, then
spread out in the sun. The fruit is then
removed by machine. In the wet method, most
of the pulp is rubbed from the seeds by
machine, then the remainder is liquefied by a
day or two of fermentation by microbes. The
seeds are then washed in copious water, dried
to about 10% moisture, and the adherent inner
“parchment shell” removed by machine. Some
sugars and minerals are leached out of wet-
processed beans, so they tend to produce
coffee with less body and more acidity than