9. Coffee: The Beans Start Inside Little Fruits
Before there is a bag of roasted beans, there is a plant covered in fruit. Coffee fruits are commonly called cherries, and many turn bright red as they ripen. With glossy leaves around them, they can look more like something destined for a fruit bowl than a coffee grinder.
Inside a typical coffee cherry are two seeds. Those are the coffee beans, though freshly processed, unroasted beans are much paler than the brown ones most people know. The fruit surrounding them has to be dealt with during processing before the seeds are ready for roasting.
Roasting brings another transformation in color and aroma, taking the ingredient toward the familiar smell of a café. The name bean is convenient, but it hides the original setting. Your morning coffee begins with seeds inside small fleshy fruits, a detail that is almost impossible to infer from a spoonful of dark grounds.
