Enjoying a cup of coffee with it’s intricate flavors and comforting aromas seldom leads the average consumer down the road to wondering what all went into making such a delicious brew.

The fact of the matter is, with a misnomer like coffee bean floating around, most people don’t even know what they are drinking let alone all the delicate steps it took to process the coffee before it even arrived from origin to be roasted.

Not only is learning about what coffee is and it’s processing at origin interesting, it can shed some light on the semi-cryptic coffee lexicon and help you better understand the flavors you are tasting in your coffee and why those flavors are there in the first place.

What is coffee exactly?

Raw coffee is a small green seed that comes from a coffee tree.

The Coffea Arabica plant is a tree that grows primarily between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. The coffee tree produces a cherry-like fruit that is most often called the coffee cherry. Inside of the fruit are two flat bottomed seeds that sit back to back in the center of the cherry. When the cherries are ripe they are harvested, the fruit is discarded, and the coffee seed is processed, dried, and bagged up for shipment.

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