Butare Coffee Washing Station

We traveled to Butare to see some Coffee Bikes in action. It seems like most of the coffee growing occurs in the southwestern part of Rwanda, so Butare was the best place to head to find a real-life coffee washing station. What exactly is a coffee washing station? Well, you may or may not know that coffee beans are basically the pits of a certain type of cherry. Coffee farmers cultivate coffee cherry trees and bring them (by bicycle or on foot) to these coffee washing stations. First, the cherries are taken out of the bag and inspected. People sort the cherries by quality and remove any bad ones. The good cherries are weighed and the farmer is paid based on the weight and quality. This is an obvious benefit of the coffee bikes; farmers can carry more coffee, which means the cherries are fresher when they arrive at the washing station.
We got a tour of the washing station, which is entirely outside on a steep hillside. Our tour guide was a young woman named Alice; her job involved recording the different lots of beans on the drying rack. Here's a short version of the tour:
After the cherries are purchased, they are placed into a pool of water for soaking, which makes it easier to separate the flesh of the fruit from the coffee bean. Then the cherries are run through a machine that pulls the flesh off. The machine looks kinda like a millstone. We didn't get to see this machine in action. After separating the beans, they are placed onto huge mesh trays, where the beans start drying and workers sort them again. At this point, the beans are pale green and have a thin outer coat. The beans turn dark brown during the roasting process (which is not done at the washing station). The sorters are looking for the following imperfections: overripe, under-ripe, worm-damaged, and machine-damaged. The overripe are a little brown and under-ripe beans are a little green. The worm-damaged beans have little bore holes in them, and the machine-damaged beans have knicks on the edges. After sorting, the beans are sent to drying racks, which cover the hillside and consist of the same mesh trays. The weather today started out cloudy with a threat of rain, so the beans on the drying racks were covered with black tarps. While we were there, the sun came out. Then we saw the workers remove the tarps. We also saw some workers checking the water content of the drying beans using a legitimate scientific instrument (it stood out because everything else was handmade from wood or other locally-made materials). It looked like there were at least 30 people working at this station, and many of them were older women. We saw some coffee farmers using their coffee bikes loaded down. It was awesome to see the early stages of coffee and how Project Rwanda has helped and will help coffee farmers.