One bean,
one cup
Coffee is a fruit, and the thing in your cup is the roasted seed from a small red cherry. Scroll to follow one of them.
The slope
It starts as fruit
Almost all of it grows on about twelve and a half million small farms, in a narrow band either side of the equator.
The pick
Taken one at a time
On a slope this steep no machine can climb. Ripeness is never uniform on one branch, so the same tree gets walked again and again across the season.
The ferment
Nothing about this can be hurried
Inside the tank microbes strip the sticky fruit layer off the seed. Stopping too early leaves it slippery; too late turns the whole batch permanently sour.
The drying bed
Down to roughly one tenth
The seeds are raked flat and turned by hand until the water inside them is almost gone.
The roast
Chemistry against a clock
After the first crack nothing you do to the bean can be undone. Beyond the point it left the farm, the grower has already been paid.
The cup
What a cup really costs
Not the bean, but the number of times somebody had to choose correctly.
The whole route
One bean, one cup
A fruit becoming a drink, repeated every single morning — and the whole of it small enough to sit on one table.