A process with a good balance of taste and aroma: that is honey. It is one of the three major processes, yet it stands in the shadow of washed and natural. One reason is that farmers dislike making it; in Laos too, my impression is that little is produced. But honey takes the best of washed and natural, and in our café it is the most popular process.
Our working definition is this.
1. Pulp the cherries (remove the skin),
2. leave the fruit (mucilage) attached to the parchment,
3. ferment and dry.
Up to this point it is the same as washed; the difference is that you do not wash. Outdoors or in a polytunnel, using sunlight, fermentation and drying proceed at the same time. It takes two to three weeks to bring the green bean to around 11% moisture.
There are several theories about the name. The fermenting mucilage smells like honey; it is sticky like honey; it is the colour of honey. From the experience of making honey coffee every year, all of them are true. Fermenting mucilage smells sweet, like honey on toast. Until it has dried some way it is sticky, and once you touch it it does not let go. The mucilage, colourless at first, slowly turns yellow with fermentation.
There are many honeys in the world: red honey, black honey and so on. The difference is how much mucilage is left on (the retention rate). "Honey" is not one colour; it is a continuous design variable. In a study comparing processes side by side, methods toward the black-honey end, keeping more mucilage, gained body and balance and came close to anaerobic fermentation in sensory terms (Chen et al., Foods 2026). On the other hand, the relative amount of aroma may peak at medium-to-high retention (the red-honey range). So for body, keep more; for aroma, keep medium to high; the design changes with the aim.
More interesting still, the microbes that do the work change with the amount you keep. With little mucilage, bacteria are the more active in forming aroma; with a lot, fungi (yeasts and moulds) take over, one report says. Mucilage is food for microbes, and its quantity changes the ecosystem of the fermentation itself. Farms in Laos have no equipment to adjust a few millimetres of mucilage precisely, so we simply write "honey process". Still, the retention rate can be guessed from colour and stickiness, and approximated by Brix and moisture.
The nature of honey "sweetness" is being taken apart by research too. The source of sweetness is sugar (the remaining mucilage and the carbohydrates of the variety); the source of acidity is the organic acids already in the bean and those made during fermentation (Tenea et al., Frontiers in Microbiology 2025). And fermentation turns sugar into acid. So the mucilage retention rate is the size of your "sugar hand", and fermentation time and temperature are the lever for how much of that sugar you turn into acid. The product of the two decides the final balance of sweetness and acidity. How fast sugar becomes acid, and which acids appear when, is in Fermentation time and organic acids.
Honey mucilage is sticky and coats the drying yard. During fermentation and drying we turn the parchment three times a day, and every time, hands and tools are sticky. It sticks to the drying beds too, so every batch ends in a big clean-up. Turn it carelessly and mould grows, which is bad for you, so the lot is discarded. Fermentation and mould are a hair apart, and every year tens of kilograms are thrown away. As a farmer and processor, I dislike honey. As a café and roaster, I love the balance of sweetness and acidity that honey gives.
Because honey keeps the fruit, drying and storage need a little more care. With mucilage left on, uneven drying and periods of high water activity (aw) arise more easily. The longer aw stays high, the higher the risk of the mycotoxin OTA (Saengrayap et al., Foods 2024). So we watch not only moisture but aw, and bring it down to the target before the lot goes into storage. The more a method aims for sweetness, the more the safety details matter.
Honey coffee is crisp yet distinctly sweet, with a syrupy texture: a dessert of a cup. We make two kinds, "honey" and "anaerobic honey". The former brings a wave of refined sweetness; the latter carries a complex, tropical-fruit acidity and finishes clean.
How much mucilage (fruit) is left on. The more you keep, the darker the colour; research shows body and balance rise and the taste moves closer to anaerobic. Honey is not one colour but a continuous variable, the retention rate.
No. The name comes from the fermenting mucilage taking on the colour, smell and stickiness of honey. The sweetness comes from the balance of fruit sugar and fermentation.
Because the sticky mucilage adds labour and cleaning, and careless turning means mould and a discarded lot; for farmers it is a method of effort and risk. In return, a well-made honey has an excellent balance of sweetness and acidity.
For the whole mechanism of fermentation see The four stages of fermentation; for drying and aw, The science of drying. For the washed method see washed; for drying the whole cherry, natural.
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