Making coffee is easy, but making coffee is hard. That is to say, once you have the ground coffee in front of you, all you have to do is boil some water, grab a filter and you're set. Before getting anywhere near this point though, the coffee has to be harvested and then processed. All of this before it's even shipped, roasted or ground.

One of the common methods of processing coffee is called Wet Processing. When it's prepared in this fashion, the coffee is then either called wet processed, naturally, or washed coffee. Processing it in this way is a difficult job and it requires a great amount of water. The idea of this process is to remove the covering, or fruit, from the coffee bean before it is dried.

Float or Sink:

Once the coffee is picked, it needs to be sorted. The good stuff has to be separated from the bad. To do this the cherries - as the beans are usually called before they are beans - are dumped into a large quantity of water. Anything that isn't ripe yet will float to the top, where it is then hopefully discarded.

Pressing the fruit:

While in the water, the cherries are pressed between large screens. Since the water is able to loosen up the skin that surrounds each cherry, the screens are able to remove it quite easily. Once the skin is gone though, there is still quite a bit of pulp left on each bean.

Ferment and Wash Method:

This is one of two methods of removing the pulp that is left on the coffee beans. There are two basic processes of fermenting the coffee. One involves extra water, and the other process has the beans fermenting in their own juices, so to speak.

The fermentation process takes anywhere from a day to a day and a half and is watched very closely to make sure everything goes correctly. Once it's done, the coffee goes into even more water where it's washed. The end result of all of this is very polluted water, though these days the amount of polluted water has been significantly reduced.

Machine Assisted Wet Processing:

In this process there is no fermenting of the beans at all. The good thing about this process is that it pollutes a lot less water. The bad thing is that it takes away a step that allows individual coffee growers to add their own touches to the flavor.

Machine Assisted Wet Processing scrubs the coffee mechanically, thus ridding it of the pulp.

Drying the Beans:

After either of the above methods is complete, the beans are washed. At this point they need to be dried. This is done one of several ways. The first is by a machine, which is the simplest yet least effective in terms of preserving quality.

The other methods involve laying the beans out, either on a table or on large patios, where they are regularly raked or hand turned so as to dry evenly.

In the End:

The dry beans are covered with a crumbly skin or parchment. This is then easily removed in a machine called a huller. In rare circumstances, the beans are shipped before this takes place with their parchments intact.