Parchment Coffee Explained

Parchment coffee is a coffee bean still wrapped in its thin, papery inner shell, the layer left behind once a ripe cherry's skin and pulp have been removed. Jamaican coffee is traded, stored and rested in this form for weeks before a coffee works removes the parchment in a final step called hulling.

What is parchment coffee?

A ripe coffee cherry has an outer skin, a layer of sweet pulp, and then the bean itself wrapped in a thin, parchment-like husk called the endocarp. Once the skin and pulp are removed, what is left, a bean still inside that papery husk, is called parchment coffee, or simply "parchment." The name comes from the husk's appearance, a thin, tan, papery layer not unlike parchment paper. It is an intermediate stage: not yet the green bean that eventually gets roasted, but no longer the whole cherry that came off the tree, and it is the form in which mills, exporters and buyers refer to the coffee for most of its time in storage.

From cherry to parchment: pulping and washing

Jamaican coffee works generally process cherries by the washed, or wet, method. At the pulpery, cherries are fed through machines that mechanically strip away the outer skin; Wallenford Coffee describes this stage as removing "the pulp (outer skin of cherries)... from the beans." The beans are then washed to remove the mucilage, a slippery layer of sugars and pectin still clinging to the parchment after pulping. Some processors use aqua pulpers that handle mucilage removal directly, while, according to Blue Mountain Coffee Jamaica's own published specifications, a smaller number of lots are still processed by the traditional fermentation method, in which mucilage is loosened by soaking rather than by machine.

Drying parchment coffee

Wet parchment, as the beans are called at this stage, is generally dried in two steps. Wallenford Coffee's own description of its process has the parchment first sun-dried on concrete patios for three to five days, reducing moisture to below 45%, and then finished in rotary mechanical dryers. Other Blue Mountain processors describe a similar combination of sun drying and mechanical drying. The goal is a stable moisture level, generally cited as around 10.5% to 11.5% for coffee destined for Jamaica's top export grades, before the parchment goes into storage.

Why parchment coffee is rested before milling

Freshly dried parchment is not hulled right away. It is bagged, or in some cases held in silos, and left to rest for an extended period, commonly described as at least eight weeks and sometimes ten weeks or more, depending on the processor. This resting period, also called conditioning, allows moisture still concentrated near the surface of the bean to spread evenly through to the center. Skipping or shortening conditioning risks uneven moisture within the bean, which can surface later as damage or inconsistent roasting, according to a general description of wet-method parchment processing published by Agriculture Institute. Coffee processors commonly describe the resting period as important to how the coffee eventually tastes, though this guide treats that, like other flavor claims, as trade description rather than an independently tested finding.

Hulling: removing the parchment

Once conditioning is complete, the parchment is hulled, or polished: machinery removes the dried husk to reveal the green coffee bean underneath. Wallenford Coffee describes this as the stage "where the husk is removed from the beans," after which the beans are graded by size and density into categories such as No.1s, No.2s, No.3s and peaberries, described further on grading, and sorted by machine and by hand to remove defects before packing. Mavis Bank Coffee Factory, one of Jamaica's largest coffee works, describes packing its milled green coffee into containers of several sizes, including 70 kg, 30 kg and 15 kg wooden barrels as well as 60 kg bags, a packing custom described in more detail on Blue Mountain coffee barrels.

Why Jamaica trades and stores coffee this way

Trading and storing coffee in parchment, rather than as green bean, protects the bean through a resting period that Jamaican processors treat as a standard part of quality control, not an optional step. Farmers generally deliver ripe cherries, not parchment, to the works; pulping, washing, drying and conditioning all happen there rather than on most individual farms, which keeps quality control consistent across many small growers' harvests. That means the milling stage, hulling, grading and packing, happens close to export, after the coffee has already rested, at a licensed coffee works such as those described on estates and on Mavis Bank. From there, milled and graded coffee is packed for sale, including in the whole bean form most home buyers actually see.