What Happens Before Your Coffee Reaches Your Cup?

At a Glance

Coffee travels a complex journey from plant to cup, involving cultivation, harvesting, processing, roasting, grinding, and brewing. Each stage influences flavour, aroma, and quality. Understanding this process highlights the craftsmanship behind every cup, helping coffee drinkers better appreciate the effort and expertise that shape their daily brew.

How Does Your Coffee Reach Your Cup?

Who doesn’t love a cup of steaming hot coffee? Whether you mix it with milk and sugar or run it through an espresso machine, most coffee drinkers can’t begin their day without it. The taste and aroma of this potent bean linger on your palate and senses till the very last drop.

You may also have enjoyed this bean in various edible forms, from cakes to protein powders. But have you wondered about the journey your morning cup of coffee takes before it reaches your mug?

As more people appreciate coffee, they want to learn more about the journey this bean makes from its crop to your cup. If you’re keen to learn more, make sure you grab yourself a nice cup of coffee as you continue reading this article. It will cover all the key steps, from the initial planting and harvesting to the processing, blending and roasting, and into your cup!

Plant

People know that most of the world’s coffee is grown in South and Central America, Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. Its journey begins with planting and nurturing coffee plants grown from either Arabica or Robusta seeds. They are typically grown in shaded nurseries or in open patches of land, under shady trees. After the seeds germinate, the first shoots and stems emerge. Once the plants are about 50 cm tall, they are replanted in their permanent groves.

Cultivators need to adapt their farming methods to a changing climate, especially in regions where rain can be unpredictable or unseasonal. A polytunnel automatic irrigation system can help cultivators adapt to changing environmental conditions. They avoid overwatering or dryness caused by traditional watering techniques like hoses or timers. Under the right conditions, these plants mature into coffee-producing trees in about 3 to 4 years.

If this piqued your interest, you can try your hand at growing a crop of your own. Maybe not coffee, but you can find a local allotment to grow nuts like almonds, chestnuts, hazelnuts and walnuts and herbs like mint to pair with your coffee.

Pick

Upon reaching maturity, the coffee bushes start to bear fruit, known as cherries, which house the coffee beans. Once they’re picked, either by hand using poles or rakes. A skilled coffee picker can harvest anywhere between 45 and 90 kg of cherries each day. Pickers select only the ripest cherries to ensure the best-quality beans. 

Coffee cherry harvesting typically takes place once or twice a year. Premium-tasting Arabica coffees follow a more selective picking method, which is more labour-intensive and time-consuming, and is therefore reflected in their price.

Sort and Process

After harvesting, the coffee cherries are ready to be processed into beans. They first undergo sorting, where any low-quality or underripe fruits are removed. Next, it is processed by removing the pulp to isolate the coffee seeds. This is typically done in two ways:

The Dry Method

This is the traditional method of processing coffee, and it doesn’t use any water. It’s still followed in coffee-producing regions where water is scarce. In the dry method, the cherries are laid out in the sun to dry till the moisture content reaches around 11%. Depending on the climate, it can take weeks or months to dry each batch of cherries.

The Wet Method

The wet method is a more modern way of processing coffee beans. The cherries are run through a pulping machine, and the extracted beans are then separated by size and weight. They are placed in water-filled fermentation tanks to remove the film covering the bean’s parchment, and then washed.

After this, the pulped and fermented beans are dried to around 11% moisture, either by machine or in the sun. Once dried, they are stored in sacks and then milled.

This process ends with hulling and sometimes polishing the beans before they are graded and sorted by size and weight. The coffee at the end of this stage, and before roasting, is called green coffee.

Roast

Green coffee is odourless, and to turn into the brown beans you know and love, it needs to be roasted. Roasting is the key process that lends coffee its unique taste and aroma. For a smooth taste, coffee beans are roasted for a specific time and under defined temperatures.

Roasting machines, such as drum roasters and hot-air roasters, operate at around 200°C. The heat pushes out the oil inside, and the bean starts to swell. The roasting duration and temperature determine light, medium, and dark roast coffees. The longer the roasting duration, the more intense the taste.

Once the desired roast is achieved, the beans are cooled quickly to prevent further roasting.

Grind

Before they reach your retail shelves, the beans are ground into various sizes. The grind size depends on the brewing method used: coarse for French Press, medium for drip coffee, and fine for espresso. They are also blended with other coffee varieties, typically about 3 to 7 types, to create the finished blend.

This process is time-sensitive, as once ground coffee aromas are released, they react in the air and oxidise. Some studies indicate that coffee beans lose about 60% of their aroma within 15 mins of grinding. This is perhaps why coffee connoisseurs choose to grind their own beans and keep the aromas longer.

Brew & Enjoy!

Finally, the journey of the humble bean is complete and is ready to be brewed, just the way you like it. Choose from classic drip coffee makers, percolators, cafetières or bean-to-cup machines to brew up a perfect cup each time.

No matter what brewing technique you use, the result is a cup that perfectly captures the beans’ journey and origin from bean to brew.

Summing Up

This article covered most aspects of what happens before your coffee reaches your cup. The journey from a nursery to your kitchen shelf includes multiple steps that shape the final product.

With this information and the complex process coffee beans undergo, the next time you brew a cup, hopefully, you will enjoy your coffee even more.