Your Coffee Was Once a Flower: From Coffee Plant to Coffee Cherry

Before it's an espresso, a green coffee bean or even a coffee cherry, your coffee starts with a small white flower. And the journey from flower to cup is considerably longer than most of us realise.

We spend an enormous amount of time talking about coffee beans.

What variety is it?

Where was it grown?

Natural or washed?

Light roast or dark roast?

Espresso or filter?

But there's a slight problem with all of this.

Coffee isn't actually a bean.

It's a fruit.

Or, more accurately, the thing we call a coffee bean is the seed of a fruit.

And before there's a fruit, there's a flower.

Which means your morning espresso started life looking considerably more like something you'd find in a garden than something you'd find in a coffee grinder.

So... coffee isn't actually a bean?

Technically, no.

What we call a coffee bean is normally one of two seeds sitting inside a coffee cherry.

When the fruit is ripe, it can be red, yellow, orange or occasionally somewhere in between, depending on the coffee variety.

Cut one open and you'll find layers of fruit surrounding the seeds.

Those seeds eventually become the green coffee that arrives at our roastery.

Then we roast them.

Then you grind them.

Then, after this entire agricultural journey, you run hot water through them because you're tired.

Coffee is a strange business.

Meet Coffea

Coffee belongs to the genus Coffea, which contains many different species. The two species most important commercially are: Coffea arabica – usually simply called Arabica.Coffea canephora – commonly known as Robusta.

Arabica is native to Ethiopia, where the species has its greatest genetic diversity. Robusta originated in the forests of western sub-Saharan Africa. And these aren't simply two different "types of beans". They are different species with different genetics, growing characteristics and responses to their environment.

What does a coffee tree look like?

Left to grow naturally, a coffee plant can become surprisingly tall. Commercial coffee farming, however, usually involves pruning the plants to keep them at a manageable height. This makes harvesting easier and encourages productive growth. The plant has glossy green leaves, white flowers and, eventually, coffee cherries. And those flowers are something special.

Coffee flowers

Coffee flower - Anak Sago, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Coffee flowers are small, white and beautifully fragrant. They can look a little like jasmine. But the flowers don't stick around for long. After flowering, the plant begins developing the fruit that will eventually become the coffee cherry. This is where things get interesting.

coffee cherries on a branch - Photo by dennis epema on Unsplash 

A coffee plantation can have flowers, green cherries and ripe cherries on the same plant at the same time. That means harvesting coffee isn't always as simple as picking everything at once.

From flower to cherry

Ripe coffee cherry - Roger Burger, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Once the flower has been pollinated, the fruit begins to develop. The green cherry slowly grows and changes as it matures. Eventually, depending on the variety, it develops its characteristic ripe colour. Inside are usually two seeds. These seeds are surrounded by layers of fruit and protective material that have to be removed during coffee processing.

Only after processing do we get what the coffee industry calls green coffee. And green coffee is what we buy from producers and eventually put into the roaster.

Coffee plants are fussy

This is one of the reasons we should probably appreciate our coffee a little more. Coffee plants don't just grow happily anywhere. They need the right combination of temperature, rainfall, sunlight, soil and drainage. 

Altitude can also have a major influence on the environment in which coffee grows. And farmers have to deal with pests and diseases, including coffee leaf rust, coffee berry disease and various insects.

As we've mentioned before on the Al-Gharb blog, coffee plants generally take around three to five years to reach an age where they can produce their first meaningful harvest.

That's a long wait for your first coffee crop.

Food for thought

Next time you open a bag of coffee, take a second to think about what you're actually looking at.

Those little brown things weren't brown.

They weren't beans.

They weren't even always seeds sitting in a warehouse.

They were inside fruit.

Growing on a tree.

And before that fruit existed, there was a small white flower.

Months of growing.

Harvesting.

Processing.

Drying.

Transporting.

Roasting.

Resting.

And brewing.

All for one cup of coffee.

So at least try not to spill it.

— Henning Al-Gharb Coffee Roasters, Algarve

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