The Journey of the Coffee Bean From Plant to Cup

Every cup of coffee starts as a seed on a farm thousands of miles away. Before it reaches your mug, it's grown, picked, processed, dried, shipped, tasted, roasted and packed, and many people play a part along the way. Here's the journey of the coffee bean, step by step.

1. Growing the coffee plant

Coffee grows in the tropics, in a band around the equator often called the bean belt, in countries such as Brazil, Colombia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Honduras and Indonesia. Seeds are first raised in a nursery, then planted out on the farm. Arabica, the species used for most speciality coffee, grows best at higher altitudes, where cooler temperatures help the flavour develop slowly.

A young arabica plant usually takes three to four years to produce its first crop.

2. Picking the cherries

A coffee bean is really the seed of a fruit called a coffee cherry. The cherries ripen from green to red (or yellow, in some varieties), and the best coffee comes from picking only the ripe ones.

On steep mountain farms, most coffee is picked by hand, often several times a season as different cherries ripen. On flatter land, as in much of Brazil, machines can do the harvesting.

3. Processing and drying

Next, the seeds have to be separated from the fruit. There are three main methods, and each one changes the flavour:

• Washed: the fruit is removed before the beans are dried. This gives a clean, bright cup.
• Natural: the whole cherry is dried in the sun, with the bean inside. This gives a sweeter, fruitier, heavier cup.
• Honey: some of the sticky fruit is left on while the bean dries, which sits somewhere in between.

The beans are dried until they're stable enough to store, then milled to remove the last dry layer of husk. What's left is green coffee.

4. Sorting, grading and export

Green coffee is sorted and graded by size, density and defects, then packed into sacks for export. Green coffee keeps far longer than roasted coffee, which is why it's shipped unroasted.

5. Tasting and cupping

Before buying, roasters and importers taste samples in a process called cupping. They roast a small amount, brew it in a standard way and score it for aroma, flavour, sweetness, acidity and body. Speciality coffee is coffee that scores 80 points or more on the Specialty Coffee Association's scale.

6. Roasting

Roasting turns hard, grassy green beans into the brown, aromatic coffee we know. Over roughly 10 to 15 minutes, sugars and amino acids react to create hundreds of flavour compounds. Around 196°C, the beans make a popping sound called first crack, and many speciality coffees are finished not long after.

Every roaster develops their own roast profile for each coffee, to bring out its best flavours. That's why we work with the UK's independent speciality roasters.

7. Packing

Freshly roasted coffee gives off carbon dioxide for several days, so it's packed in bags with a one-way valve that lets gas out without letting air in. The bag should show the roast date, so you know how fresh it is.

8. Brewing your cup

The final step is yours. Grind just before brewing, use the right amount of coffee and water just off the boil, and all that work pays off in the cup. Here are our five steps to better coffee.