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Pulped natural

The cherry is skinned and the seed is dried in its mucilage with no fermentation tank and no washing. The name is the English one for Brazil's cereja descascado; in outline it is the same as the honey process.

In short

Pulped natural is the English name for a method Brazil calls cereja descascado: the cherry is skinned, and the seed is dried in its parchment with the mucilage still on it. There is no fermentation tank and no washing.

The Food and Agriculture Organization's guidance on coffee processing describes it as a recent innovation and a third way of handling pulped coffee, beside fermenting the mucilage off and removing it by machine. In outline it is the same as the honey process.

The sequence

Sourced

  1. Wash and float the harvest

    The harvest is passed through water, which separates fruit that has dried on the tree, and debris, from fresh cherries.

  2. Pulp

    Ripe cherries are skinned. A study of the method's adoption in São Paulo state describes a pulper working under pressure that skins the ripe cherries and leaves hard unripe fruit whole, so that it can be taken out.

  3. Dry in the mucilage

    The pulped parchment goes straight to the patio or dryer without its mucilage being removed.

  4. Hull

    The dried parchment is hulled to leave green coffee.

The outline is the FAO guidance's. The detail of the pulping step is from the study of the method's adoption in São Paulo state.

What it was introduced to do

Sourced

Brazil's traditional method is the natural process, and much of its coffee is harvested in one pass, ripe and unripe together. In a natural, everything that is picked is dried and stays in the lot. The adoption study gives the attraction of pulping first: lots come out free of the defects of unripe fruit and of black beans. Its authors, who are economists and tasted nothing, say this improves the flavour substantially and that the coffee came to stand in for washed coffees in large roasters' blends.

It also leaves less to dry. The adoption study puts the saving at up to 40 per cent of the volume that has to be dried and stored in a season, because the skins and part of the mucilage have gone, and names the water the method uses as its drawback. The FAO guidance's figure for the dry process is almost twice as much water to remove as in the wet process, for the same green coffee.

Pulped natural and honey

CoffeeHQ explanation

The two names describe the same outline, and no document read for this page draws a line between them. Pulped natural is the name used for the Brazilian method, and honey comes with colour words for how much mucilage is left on, which pulped natural does not. A bag that says one or the other is telling you where the vocabulary came from as much as what was done.

Pulped natural and the cup

Tendency, not a guarantee

The trade describes pulped naturals as keeping some of the body and sweetness of a natural with fewer of its faults. The part of that with a documented basis is the second: the method removes defects that a natural keeps. Nothing read for this page compared the taste of a pulped natural with a natural from the same fruit.

Three things this page cannot give you

CoffeeHQ explanation

How much Brazilian coffee is pulped natural. The Brazil entry found no figure it could source, and neither did this page.

A difference between pulped natural and honey beyond the names. None was found in the documents read.

How it tastes. No tasting study of the method was read.

What to do next

  • Brazil — The method in its setting: how the crop is picked, why unripe fruit is the problem, and the three routes the coffee takes.
  • Honey process — The same outline with its colour vocabulary, and what one study found about mucilage.
  • Drying coffee — What happens once the pulped coffee reaches the yard.
  • Become a coffee expert — A structured programme from the plant and its processing to roasting, water and tasting.

Steps

  1. Pulping
  2. Drying with mucilage present

Where this method is documented in the atlas

Only countries CoffeeHQ has written an entry for, and only where a document it has read says so. Each line is what that document says. It is not a share of the crop, and this is not a list of everywhere the method is used.

described as present-day practice

  • Brazil. Established in Brazil in the 1990s as cereja descascado: ripe cherries are skinned under pressure, unripe ones are left whole and separated, and the seed is dried in its mucilage with no fermentation step. Source: Impactos econômicos da tecnologia do café cereja descascado.

Related flavour attributes

Learn it as a course

The Coffee Expert lesson Processing covers this ground in order, with exercises you can do at home.