Quality Control

Hands at Work

Taken at different times in different countries, this starts to get at the incredible amount of manual labor involved in coffee from here and many many other parts of the world. Coffee is simply incredibly labor intensive. Not in the a heavy-lifting or dangerous sort of way, it's just time-consuming and detailed. Imagine sorting through beans one by one and picking out the defective or otherwise poor quality specimens. Not with some machine, just your eyes and your fingers. Tens of thousand of kilos of 'em. That's what happens with coffee.

The left side is the choosing of the cherries before they are pulped. One by one, the inferior ones get chucked. The right side is the dried beans about to get processed through the dry mill and shipped abroad. Hundred of folks, mostly women and children) were sorting through the dried beans. Not pictured is the additional sorting that happens on the drying racks just after the coffee is washed and fermented.

Make pictures, take nothing for granted.