Assessment of the Effectiveness of Coffee De-mucilager and Driers for Physical and Sensorial Coffee Quality

Coffee Arabica is an essential commodity to the livelihood of millions of Ethiopians and its quality has critical importance to the coffee industry. The objective of the present study was to evaluate the effect of newly introduced coffee post- harvest machineries and driers on coffee raw, cup and total quality as compared to the conventional processing methods. Different methods, such as normal fermentation (conventional) and drying in sun, normal fermentation and drying in artificial drier, normal fermentation dried in poly tunnel drier, demucilager pulped and dried in sun, demucilager pulped and dried in artificial drier and demucilager pulped dried in poly tunnel were used for coffee sample preparation. The experiment was conducted during the 2017/18 and 2018/19 cropping season at Limmu Kossa coffee plantation. Both raw and cup quality parameters were evaluated by a team of certified panelists at Jimma Agricultural Research Center (JARC) coffee processing and quality analysis laboratory and analyzed using completely Randomized Design (CRD). Physical coffee quality parameters such as Bean size, Bean shape and make, color and odor showed no statistically significant (P > 0.05) difference for all preparation methods. The highest values of cup quality parameters like Acidity (AC), astringency (AS), bitterness (BI), body (BO), flavor (FL) and overall quality (OAQ) were recorded for coffee samples prepared using demucilager pulper and dried in tunnel drier. Samples pulped by demucilager and dried in poly tunnel drier exhibited the highest values, 35.67, 47.50 and 83.17, for raw, cup and total quality, respectively. It seems important to further study the biochemical composion of samples prepared using in such new introduced demucilager and driers in the future.