I recently got some Indonesian Mandeling coffee. This green coffee looks like a mess, some are large, lots are small, many are broken and a large number of them have defects. More than 12% of this coffee should not land in your cup of joe. But after proper sorting, this bean can really shine. The problem however is that this sorting is a tedious proces. It takes more than an hour to sort 750 grams of this coffee. Frans Goddijn uses a his own fan and a pan technique for sorting the beans. This is presumably a good and effective method. But because I was looking for my first Laser Cutting project I thought of something else.
Why not draw some Coffee Grading Sieves and laser cut it? This was exactly what I did.
The sieves were laser cut by Laserbeest and they have done an excellent job. The sieves precisely fit a springform cake pan. I drew 6 of them, below you can see the first three of them. The costs for lasering were higher than I expected. I will need to laser the last three sieves in a Fablab to keep the costs low.
Photo by Frans Goddijn.