Coffee

While living in Colombia and traveling in the countryside, I was continually aware of Coffee cultivation, harvesting, and processing.  You will discover there are various ways the fruit can be picked and prepared for market.  

Most elegantly, Juan Valdez works through the Coffee plantation in sequential sweeps, picking only the cherry red fruit, each of which has a pair of mature cream-colored seed.  Back at the ranch, those fruit are broken open so the seed can be washed free of pulp.  Once dried, the seed are ready for shipping and roasting.  

But there are less tedious ways to harvest coffee.  You might go to the plantation and pick all fruit, regardless whether ripe or not.  Then you can simply dry the fruit and mechanically rasp away the hard pulp.  These methods yield a different product, with different flavor profiles.  

Coffee addicts know the taste they like, and seek out the roasted seed that will yield their desired brew.  Generally, the more tedious and precise the processing, the cleaner the ultimate taste. 

Coffee for grinding is marketed as “beans”, but that is problematic.  It would be better to call them Coffee seed, which is botanically accurate. 

Systematists categorize the shrub Coffea arabica in the Rubiaceae, a plant family that also includes Cinchona, the source of Quinine (think Malaria and Tonic Water), and Rubia tinctorum, which yields a red dye called Madder.  A systematists larder would not find other produce in the same nook, though not too distant from the Coffee family are the Mints (the Lamiaceae), which would provide more company. 

Informally, the fruit of Coffee is a berry.  But the flowers of all plants in the Rubiaceae have inferior ovaries, so it would be inconsistent to call this fruit a Bacca.  I am calling it a Sepultura (a berry formed from an inferior ovary).

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