Many people drink coffee every day, yet have never seen what a coffee fruit actually looks like. The coffee fruit resembles a cherry and turns red when ripe; its internal structure determines the final form of the coffee bean. This article uses anatomical diagrams to show in detail the outer skin, pectin layer, inner skin, silver skin, and seed of the coffee fruit, and traces the complete chain from picking, washed or dry processing, roasting, to extraction. It also introduces the distribution characteristics of the global coffee belt, as well as the basic differences among the three native species: Arabica, Robusta, and Liberica. The article also recommends related products from Front Street Coffee, helping enthusiasts understand more intuitively the transformation of coffee from fruit to cup.
These coffee fruits are so beautiful!
We drink coffee almost every day, but not many people have seen coffee beans, and even fewer have seen coffee fruit.
Some in the industry say coffee is actually a kind of juice, but I don't quite agree with that. Juice is a liquid product obtained from fruit through physical methods such as pressing, centrifugation, and extraction, usually referring to pure juice or 100% juice. Coffee, on the other hand, uses the coffee bean (seed), which after roasting is extracted with water to obtain its soluble substances, ultimately producing a beverage. It is not the juice of the coffee fruit.
The Coffee Growing Belt
Most of the world's coffee-producing regions are distributed in the tropical zone between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, an area known as the "Coffee Belt," written in English as Coffee Belt or Coffee Zone. As a tropical cash crop, the coffee tree grows in places within the coffee belt with superior climate, where there is direct sunlight year-round, abundant heat, plentiful rainfall, and an average annual temperature above 20°C. However, high temperatures, high humidity, and strong sunlight are not something all coffee varieties can withstand. For example, some Arabica coffee trees cannot tolerate high temperatures and humidity, so they are often planted at higher altitudes; if the sunlight is too strong, shade is also needed, which is where the terms "rainforest coffee" and "shade-grown coffee" come from.
Coffee Fruit
The coffee fruit is very small, about the same size as a cherry. Ripe coffee fruit is red (special varieties are not discussed here), so it is also called a coffee cherry. There are three major native species of coffee: Arabica (low yield, delicate, but high quality), Robusta (highest yield, easy to grow, but poor quality), and Liberica (a variety that is slowly disappearing, so we won't discuss it).
Picking coffee fruit is very hard work. In Brazil, some are picked by machine, but most good beans need to be hand-picked, because coffee fruits ripen at different times, and picking needs to be done in several rounds.
From the anatomical diagram, it is very clear that the coffee bean is the part in the middle. The skin and pulp must both be removed during processing. The silver skin, which is the seed coat, also falls off during roasting.
Outer skin, pectin layer, inner skin
After green coffee beans are roasted into roasted beans, many chemical changes occur inside the beans. New substances are constantly being created, and the aromatic substances in coffee are produced at this time.
After coffee fruit is picked, it undergoes washing or drying to become the green coffee beans we commonly see. The green beans then undergo high-temperature roasting to become roasted beans. The roasted beans are ground into coffee powder, and the coffee powder is then brought into contact with water for extraction to become the black coffee we drink. No additives are added throughout the entire process! This is what truly healthy coffee is!
Please don't say coffee is unhealthy, because you haven't yet drunk real coffee, because you still don't understand coffee!
The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.
