As we toured the Doka Estate coffee plantation, I was fascinated by how simple and almost primitive the technology to produce coffee is. I was impressed by how the extra fruit trees were used to keep pests from eating the coffee. It isn’t a complete replacement for pesticides, but it’s a simple addition that greatly helps.

Another simple and impressive technology was the float test used to filter the good cherries from the bad ones. Using the density to ensure that the cherries are all ripe is a great way to check the freshness of countless cherries. The alternative to this would be to go through all of the cherries by hand, and that would be very expensive for not too different of a return.

The third simple technology was the second cherry sorter. This machine sorts the cherries by size, using holes in a spinning device, and then uses a device that looks like a circular cheese grater to peel off the outer skin. I thought this process would have to be done by hand, but surprisingly, it can be done with fairly simple devices.

The one part of the process that requires complex machines is the drying. there is a giant oven-type machine used to dry the beans once they have been sorted and peeled, but even that has an alternative method where the beans are dried in the sun for several days.