Is that one shot or two?
Are you a coffee fan? Have you ever stopped to think where it comes from? Likely. Coffee is often marketed by it’s origin, or who picked it (or at least how the people who picked it are treated!).
Coffee beans are the seed pod of the coffee tree, Coffea, which is in the family Rubiaceae - the same family as gardenia. There are two main commercial species, Coffea arabica and C. canephora (robusta) but there are plenty of other species as well.
Coffea is a shrubby tree that can grow quite tall in the wild, but typically grow to 2-4 m in cultivation. They have the same beautiful glossy leaves with defined veins that make the leaf look almost crimped. The flowers are small perfumed white blossoms which give way to coffee ‘cherries’ which start green and usually ripen to red, although you can get yellow and even purple. As the term ‘cherries’ suggests, about the size of a small cherry and contain two seeds - and it’s the seeds that eventually become the dark brown beans which we grind and enjoy! Before we skip ahead to the end, the cherries themselves are edible - they are quite sweet (although not terribly fleshy, mostly skin and nothing to write home about). The skins of the cherries can also be turned into a tea of their own called Cascara which means ‘husk’ or ‘peel’ in Spanish.
Coffee cherries and seeds or ‘beans’
But back to our daily beverage….. cherries are picked, the seeds are separated from the flesh, fermented, dried, graded and roasted. The roasting process determines the darkness of the final bean - as the packet says a lighter or darker roast!. The whole process takes a few days, and from one coffee tree you might harvest 2 or 3 kg of cherries, which once processed would give you 0.5-0.8 kg of beans. Think how many bags of coffee beans you go through in a year and you get an idea of just how many coffee trees we need!
Coffee trees are said to have originated in eastern Africa (Ethiopia) and need rich, free draining soil, warm temperatures and ideally dappled light. The majority of commercial crops exist in the ‘coffee belt’ which is a region around the world between the Tropic of Capricorn and Tropic of Cancer. Of course they can be grown outside of this region -for example my little tree!- as long as you provide warmth and shelter. My tree is a few years old and while this is it’s best crop yet I daresay I’d be lucky to get more than a mornings worth of coffee out of it so for now, I’ll just enjoy the novelty.
My coffee harvest