Due to the fruit not ripening uniformly, farmers have to choose between mechanically harvesting the coffee, strip picking it, or paying pickers to only pick ripened berries. All of these options have pros and cons, both financially and in regards to quality.

Machine harvesting is done by driving a machine down the rows of planted coffee trees. The machine shakes the trees and as it goes by, it knocks the fruit off from the tree.

Benefits: cost-effective, but not quality-effective. Mechanically harvesting results in underripe, ripe and overripe cherries. These must then be sorted out along with the foliage that is also knocked out of the trees by the machine.

Mechanical harvesting is not even an option for most farms because so many are located on parts of mountains where the slope is too steep to drive these harvesting machines. One place where it is used extensively is in the country of Brazil. Many large farms in Brazil are located on a plateau and so they are at an elevation where they can grow coffee, but the incline is not too steep that they cannot mechanically harvest.

On most other farms, because the slope is too steep and the terrain too hilly, the cherries must be harvested by hand. Strip picking is one of the ways by which coffee is hand picked. Strip pickers remove all of the cherries on a branch with one movement. This is similar to mechanical harvesting in the sense that it is quick, as well as imprecise. Just as with mechanical harvesting, strip picking yields many under and over ripe berries.

The other option farmers have is another form of hand picking. Farmers may pay pickers to go through and pick only the fully ripened berries, leaving the rest to continue to ripen on the tree. Pickers will have to make multiple passes through the harvesting period, sometimes even multiple a day. This is a very tedious, time consuming and costly way to harvest coffee, but it without a doubt produces a higher quality harvest than the other two previously mentioned methods.

After harvesting, the coffee is sorted to remove any over or under ripe cherries. This is done in a few different ways. The first of which is by hand. Workers sit and sort out the under or over ripe cherries. This is more common in countries where labor wages are low. The other way of sorting is by use of a flotation tank. The cherries are put in a large tank of water and the ripened cherries sink to the bottom and continue on to be processed. The under ripe cherries float to the top of the tank and are skimmed off.

The most common method used is called washed or fully washed process.

The washed process starts off by what is called depulping or wet milling the coffee. Wet milling machines squeeze the cherries, forcing out the seed from the fruit rind, and separating out the rind. After wet milling there is still fruit left on the seed called mucilage.

To remove the mucilage, the seeds are placed in large troughs of water called fermentation tanks. In the fermentation tank, defected seeds float to the top and are skimmed off. The rest of the seeds ferment in the tank to break down the mucilage. After properly fermenting, the seeds are then removed from the tanks and rinsed to remove any remaining mucilage and are then ready to be dried.

In order to be stored and shipped without molding, coffee has to be dried down to a moisture content of roughly 11%. Most coffees produced around the world are dried in the sun. Coffees dried in the sun utilize either a raised sun-bed (most often seen in Africa) or a patio on the ground (most often seen in Latin America.) In some counties where it is too wet to dry coffee in the sun, beans can also be mechanically dried, though machine drying is considered to be inferior to sun drying. This is because slower drying upholds the desirable flavors better, and sun drying takes longer than machine drying. Patio drying is believed to be much faster than raised beds, because of the heat that the patio holds and is therefore considered to be inferior to raised beds.