Washing Station
A washing station is where farmers take their coffee to be pulped and cleaned and sometimes dried before export. The name of the washing station is often the name of the owner, or sometimes the name of the village where the station is located.
While some larger coffee farms have their own washing stations, many small coffee producers rely on community stations to buy their cherry or belong to cooperatives that wash or process coffees for members. In rare cases, small coffee holders pulp their coffee by hand on small machines and wash the coffee in small batches in makeshift holding tanks.
The term washing station is a blanket definition referring to any place that pulps coffee (removing the skin and mucilage) and then holds the seeds in water tanks to clean the remaining mucilage, leaving the seed in parchment to be dried. The parchment is a thick, protective layer of cellulose around the seed which separates it from the flesh of the fruit.
Sometimes the coffee in parchment is then dried onsite at the washing station, along with natural process and honey process coffees. This is common in Ethiopia, where much of the drying is done on raised beds on the steep sides of hilly terrain. In other countries, such as Nicaragua, the washed coffees are immediately trucked to a dry mill in lower elevation flatlands. The dry mill then dries the coffee on patios, removes the parchment, bags the coffee in jute or Grain-pro, and exports the coffee.
