Meet the Coffee Bean

Greetings!

Meet the coffee bean!

Huh?

If you’re confused, or convinced I inserted a photo of underripe grapes, don’t worry. Today its meet-the-Coffee-bean day (a national holiday), so it’s the perfect time to get acquainted with them!

First things first, let me drop a quick fact on you: coffee is a fruit. The actual coffee bean, which we know and love, is the seed (center, pip) of a fruit commonly referred to as the Coffee Cherry, which grows on the Coffea plant. That lil underripe grape up there? That’s a coffee cherry! In the center is two hard green beans (though about 10-15% of cherries have one bean; these guys are called a “peaberry”)

Look at that precious little baby! I just wanna take those lil guys home with me.

When these beans are roasted, they turn brown and look just like the coffee beans we are familiar with. Surrounding those green beans is a tiny bit of the sweet flesh of the fruit, which is not super popularly consumed, in part because there’s so little flesh around the beans.

The Coffea plant is tropical, growing best in warm climates. Brazil produces 30-40% of the world’s coffee, with over 4.2 million acres of coffee fields in the Southeast region alone. If you think that’s a lot, you’ll be surprised at Brazil’s production throughout history. Brazil has long been a coffee king, but their production peaked in the 1920s, when they supplied 80% of the worlds coffee! WOW!

Now that you’ve met the coffee bean, the stage is set for us to go into the roasting process, a wonderful chemical process that turns the green coffee beans into the ready-to-brew brown beans we know and love.

So with that, see y’all later, and stay Caffeinated!