Coffee beans aren’t really beans

You may think that coffee beans are beans but that is not so at all. The proper term describing coffee is fruit. I myself haven't wondered where they get the raw coffee beans we use. It was just to write about but I'm not a coffee fan, I must like the Lipton brand, with a little but of sugar and milk.

For the coffee seed, we take it from a fruit called cherry. Some call it coffee berries. I wish took pictures of that but the next time I get the chance to pass by a farm that has it, I'll share some photos with you.

The cherry grows on a small plant that is predominantly green. The coffee cherry fruit is ready to be harvested once it turns from green to red. The fruit has seeds in the middle that are roasted and dried to make the coffee. Most fruits have about two seeds that are cleaned and removed after the fruit is picked and then the seeds get dried in the sun.

I have seen it done on a farm and to avoid seeds from not being dried well enough, the seeds are rotated by hand. The seeds then undergo a heating process known as roasting. The seeds then get a color change from light to dark and both the taste and the smell become intensified. There are different flavors for light roast and dark roast. To say coffee grows in pods, like beans is inaccurate. That's what I imagined at first but I know the truth now.

You take something like cowpea, they do grow in pods but coffee does not. Before the seed is removed, it first develops as a fruit and that is the main reason why I think the term bean is completely wrong. Learning this changed how I thought about coffee. Given that it is made with seeds rather than beans, it made more sense to think of it as more of a fruit seed beverage.

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