Coffee Isn't a Bean...

Have you ever thought about what exactly coffee is? Or rather, what coffee was before it was in your morning cup? It occurred to me this week, so many people don’t know the truth about coffee! I remember being curious about it myself, before it became my profession. 

So, is coffee a bean? We call it coffee “beans”, but if you think about it, there’s no way your morning mug of coffee is related to your cold weather bowl of chili, right? Right.

The short answer? Coffee is not a bean at all! Coffee is a seed--the seed of a cherry to be precise. 

This is a picture of coffee cherries on a coffee plant.

These are pictures of a green coffee seed inside a cherry!

And see the green seed on the far right side of this picture? That’s what the coffee looks like when I get my hands on it! It's wild!

Coffee has to be farmed as a cherry, harvested by hand (!), and processed (in lots of unique ways) to get the fruit off of it. After all that, its seed is dried and transported to Tag! Once it’s in my hands, I carefully roast it, bringing out as much of the natural potential and sweetness as I can, and then I package it and send it to you, Coffee has a long journey to go through before it even gets to me, and even after all that, it still doesn’t resemble that sweet sweet bean we all recognize. 

Coffee amazes me. It turns out, coffee isn’t a bean--it’s a sweet delicious seed that has to be hand picked, extracted from its fruit, dried, roasted to 400+ degrees, pulverized in a grinder, scalded with water and then, and only then, can we taste and assess the fruit of all the labor. There’s so much to talk about concerning how coffee gets from farm to Tag and then from Tag to you. But for now, I will leave it at that. 

Coffee is amazing. 

Levi Hartsfield // Roaster & Co-Founder