GRADING AND SORTING @museum.de

The warehouse we’re in was used to process coffee from 1896 onwards. Picking over and sorting out the bad pips was manual work done exclusively by women.

Up to 300 women once sat at long tables beneath the glass roof of this store room. In front of them lay the coffee beans. They had to use both hands to sort out the bad pips, like the pigeons sorting the peas in the fairy tale of Cinderella.

In Germany, green and roasted coffee kernels were still being sorted by hand on motorised sorting tables until the 1970s.

Here at the coffee museum, our display includes a single-user sorting machine built in 1940 by the firm of G. W. Barth in Ludwigsburg.

The green coffee was filled into the machine's hopper from a sack. A female worker sat in the chair in front of the machine and was able to adjust the speed by operating the foot pedal, much like a sewing machine. The conveyor belt then moved the coffee forward. The worker had to keep her eyes peeled to spot the bad pips and use both hands to discard them into the slots on either side. The good coffee seeds finally dropped through a gap at the front and were collected in a sack.

Finding the “stinkers” was crucial. Stinkers are decomposing coffee beans that can spoil large quantities of coffee, something that hasn’t changed. Each worker had to sort up to eight kilogrammes (nearly eighteen pounds) of green coffee an hour. The work was poorly paid and strictly monitored, so the worker might even have her low wages docked if the amount fell short.

Between the two single-user machines, there’s a long sorting table with six work places. At this table, the female workers had to adapt to the speed of the motor. Since the 1990s, industrialised countries have switched to electronic sorting machines, so these days, coffee is no longer sorted by hand in Germany. But in most coffee-growing countries, the processing is still done by hand: from picking to drying to sorting.