No 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 →. Whole ripe cherry goes to the Drying bedsWhere parchment or whole cherry dries: a concrete patio, a raised mesh bed or a covered parabolic dryer. Colombian lots usually dry under cover over one to three weeks.More → or the raised bed and stays there until the fruit has dried hard around the seed, which takes two weeks and often longer. 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 → is never washed off; it dries onto the ParchmentThe papery husk around each green bean. Coffee is dried and stored in parchment, and hulled out of it shortly before export.More →.
The fermentation is not skipped, only moved. It happens under an intact skin, in a sugar-rich space that runs short of oxygen early, which is why the line between a natural and an AnaerobicFermented in a sealed, valved tank where the microbes' own carbon dioxide pushes the oxygen out. The word names the tank, not the drying: an anaerobic natural then dries in the fruit, an anaerobic washed is rinsed.More → is blurrier than the labels suggest.
A slower, riskier road
Because the skin stays on, moisture and gas move slowly and the interior turns low-oxygen well before drying is finished. Filamentous fungi matter far more here than in a washed lot, because the substrate stays wet and sweet for days rather than hours.
Drying time depends on how much fruit is loaded onto a square metre. Colombian solar drying generally runs seven to fifteen days with naturals at the long end, and under humid conditions the range documented stretches from twelve to thirty-two days. Every extra day is another day for something to go wrong.
Far less controlled Colombian research exists on naturals than on washed coffee. The direction of the cup is well established; the mechanism behind any particular flavour is not.