Step out of a car at Octavio's processing plant and you're instantly hit with the smell: toasty, warm, nutty, like a peach pit drying in the Georgia sun. It's the smell of drying coffee beans—also, of course, the seeds of a fruit. But how they go from soft cherries to green, dry beans is quite an involved process. More

If this online media thing doesn't work out, I'm moving to Brazil as a coffee harvester. At least, that's what went through my head after a morning stripping cherries from the coffee trees of the Nossa Senhora Aparecida farm outside Pedregulho, Brazil. It's hard labor, if not back-breaking; an hour in the fields certainly left this reasonably fit author in a sweat. But the elegance with which expert pickers fill sacks of Skittle-rainbowed coffee beans makes their work seem at least as much art as chore. (The verdant postcard views and piercing 70-degree winter sun certainly wouldn't hurt, either.) More