Coffee is a fruit, and the thing in your
cup is the roasted seed from a small red cherry.
Almost all of it grows on about twelve and
a half million small farms, in a narrow equatorial band.
On a slope this steep no machine can
climb, so the ripe cherries are still taken one by one.
Ripeness is never uniform on one branch,
so the same tree gets walked again and again across the season.
Inside the tank microbes strip the sticky
fruit layer off the seed, and nothing about that can be hurried.
Stopping the ferment too early leaves the
seed slippery, and stopping too late turns the whole batch permanently sour.
The seeds are raked flat and turned by
hand until the water inside them falls to roughly one tenth.
Beyond this point the grower has already
been paid, and everything added to the price is added by somebody else.
Roasting is chemistry against a clock, and
after the first crack nothing you do to the bean can be undone.
None of these steps is difficult alone,
and every one of them is happening again somewhere behind you now.
What a cup really costs is not the bean
but the number of times somebody had to choose correctly.
So the whole thing is a fruit becoming a
drink, one bean and one cup, repeated every single morning.