Dry Mill Processing

The blended coffee is now ready to be packed as green coffee fit for export... Well technically not until it has passed through the central liquoring unit.

Then finally the beans arrive on the conveyer belt, they are visually inspected by the women. In this case 30 women who were diligently working. They will pick out any beans which do not adhere to their standards, i.e. insect damage, broken beans and undersized beans.

The two groups of accepted beans are then iron polished, this removes the final outer fibre layer known as sliverskin.

At this stage of the processing the green coffee on the left has been rejected by the optical machine , whilst the right sample has been allowed to continue on for further cleaning. Rejected coffee is not wasted, but re bagged and resold on the ECX for domestic consumption.

Then the beans are passed onto the optical machine, this machine amongst other things detects defaults via colour, shape density and size. It works with beans passing through various streams of sensory detectors; those which are rejected and accepted are then air popped into the respective pipes (domestic, acceptable grade, and not so acceptable). At the time it had been programed to recognise 69 defaults.

Then the beans moved onto a densimetric table, hhe table vibrates separating the beans by density. The least dense stay at the back whilst the rest moving onto the front. Once sorted they are air sucked into their respective chutes.

Next the beans pass through a variety of different sized sieves, which sorted them by size and shape.

The beans are then passed onto the catimor machine, here air is used to sperate green beans from foreign objects such as stones, wood and dust.

The dried parchment is emptied into the hopper then air sucked into a hulling machine, here the parchment (husk) is removed using rotating blades. The parchment is kept in a separate silo, it's not wasted, as they sell it at the local market. It's apparently a nifty carbon starter for stove fires.

Some sundried Lekempti still in parchment (husk). Both sundried and washed coffees are kept in this state, prior to being processed.