What is hand sorting in green coffee?

Hand sorting is the manual inspection and removal of defective beans by trained workers on a conveyor belt or sorting table at the dry mill - done after machine-based colour sorting has already made its pass.

Workers remove anything outside specification: black beans the optical sorter missed, partial defects, irregular shapes, translucent or under-formed beans. It's labour-intensive, adds meaningful cost, and makes a genuine difference to the final defect count.

In many producing countries, hand sorting is done primarily by women, and the skill and attention of the sorting team is one of the most underappreciated human factors in green coffee quality. European Preparation (EP) designates coffees that have received an additional manual pass after machine sorting. When that's part of the price difference between two comparable lots, the extra cost reflects this labour directly.