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Coffee is a fruit, and the thing in your

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cup is the roasted seed
from a small red cherry.

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Almost all of it grows on about twelve and

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a half million small farms,
in a narrow equatorial band.

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On a slope this steep no machine can

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climb, so the ripe cherries
are still taken one by one.

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Ripeness is never uniform on one branch,

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so the same tree gets walked
again and again across the season.

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Inside the tank microbes strip the sticky

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fruit layer off the seed, and
nothing about that can be hurried.

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Stopping the ferment too early leaves the

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seed slippery, and stopping too late
turns the whole batch permanently sour.

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The seeds are raked flat and turned by

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hand until the water inside
them falls to roughly one tenth.

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Beyond this point the grower has already

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been paid, and everything added to
the price is added by somebody else.

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Roasting is chemistry against a clock, and

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after the first crack nothing
you do to the bean can be undone.

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None of these steps is difficult alone,

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and every one of them is happening
again somewhere behind you now.

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What a cup really costs is not the bean

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but the number of times somebody
had to choose correctly.

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So the whole thing is a fruit becoming a

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drink, one bean and one cup,
repeated every single morning.