What is strip picking in coffee harvesting?

Strip picking is a harvesting method in which all the fruit on a coffee branch is removed at once - ripe, underripe, and overripe cherries together - rather than selecting only ripe cherries in multiple passes. It's done either by hand (running fingers along branches to strip all fruit) or mechanically using harvesting equipment.

The primary advantage is speed and efficiency. Strip picking is significantly faster and cheaper than selective hand-picking, making it economically viable for large-scale operations where the labour costs of multiple selective passes would be prohibitive. Brazil, the world's largest coffee producer, uses strip picking and mechanical harvesting extensively.

The trade-off is cup quality. Because underripe and overripe cherries inevitably mix with ripe fruit in the same batch, the starting material for processing is less uniform. Underripe cherries contribute less sweetness and more astringency; overripe ones introduce fermented notes. Well-managed strip-picked lots can still produce good commercial coffee - particularly when density sorting and colour sorting remove defective material downstream - but the quality ceiling is lower than a lot built from selectively picked, uniformly ripe cherry.