The cherry is DepulpingSqueezing the skin and most of the fruit off fresh cherry, usually within hours of picking. The first step of a washed or honey process.More →, and then the washing step simply does not happen. The MucilageThe sweet, slippery layer between the fruit skin and the parchment. Washing takes it off, a honey keeps it, a natural dries the whole fruit around it.More → stays on the ParchmentThe papery husk around each green bean. Coffee is dried and stored in parchment, and hulled out of it shortly before export.More → and goes to the bed with it. In CenicaféThe federation's research centre at Chinchiná, Caldas, since 1938. It bred Colombia, Castillo and Tabi, and publishes the trials the house cites.More →'s framing this is an incomplete fermentation, stopped before the mucilage would have degraded enough to rinse away.
It sits between the other two by construction, and the house treats it as a method with a wide spread of outcomes rather than a guaranteed middle path.
What the Colombian trials found
This is where primary research and marketing part company. Cenicafé ran nine treatments in a randomised complete block with nine replications at a controlled nineteen degrees, and found no statistically significant difference in Cup scoreA score out of 100 on the SCA cupping form. Specialty begins at 80. On a lot record the score always names who cupped it: the exporter, the house or a Q grader.More → across any of them.
The correctly processed washed control averaged 81.6 with no defects. The honey-intent treatments carried a twenty-two to seventy-seven per cent probability of producing cups with sensory defects, and a sixty-seven to seventy-eight per cent probability of not beating that control.
Read plainly: on those trials a honey was more likely to underperform a well-made washed coffee than to beat it. That is not an argument against honeys, which at their best are very good. It is an argument that the label on the bag predicts far less than the execution behind it.
