How Does Coffee Grow?

Coffee is at the centre of what we do at Boun Beans. Luxury coffee starts right back at the farm and the tree itself. We rely on the great coffee farmers we work with to offer you these fantastic specialty coffees. But you might ask yourself, what really happens on a coffee farm to produce these world-class cups of coffee?

Well, it all starts with a coffee bean. To grow coffee, you must plant a coffee bean in the ground and keep the soil wet for weeks on end in order for it to germinate and grow into a shoot. Then the coffee tree takes around four years to grow to maturity and start producing coffee cherries. Most coffee trees are quite thin and are kept trimmed around 6ft tall, with big shiny green leaves. If the trees are planted in the wrong soil, too high up the mountain or too close to sea level, then they will not produce good coffee. To produce specialty coffees, luxurious enough for our customers, we choose to work with coffee growers in high altitude locations, where they grow top quality Arabica coffees.

A coffee cherry starts out its life as a little white flower. It looks quite like a jasmine flower and has a beautiful aroma like walking into a florist. Over months this flower will become a coffee cherry. Initially the cherries are green and hard, but as they mature, they grow larger, softer and sweeter. Eventually the cherries become bright red or sometimes yellow in the case of the Brazilian Yellow Catuai we currently offer. When the coffee cherry is ripe it is ready to be harvested. Our coffees are picked by hand by the growers and their harvesting team. What this means is that the farmers go from tree to tree, selecting only the ripest cherries and leaving the green cherry on the tree to be harvested at a later time. By selecting ripe cherry, the coffees are much sweeter, less bitter and full of exceptional flavours.

Once the coffees have been picked, the farmer has to get the beans from the cherry. Inside each cherry are two small coffee beans. To remove the fruit of the cherry, the farmer can either ‘wash’ the coffee or use what is called the ‘natural’ method. When you used the washed method, the beans are squeezed out of the cherry with a pulping machine. The beans are then put in water and left to soak for a period of twelve to thirty six hours. During this time the sticky sweet fruit of the coffee cherry begins to loosen off the beans themselves. After this the coffee beans are washed clean and left to dry. That is why it is called the ‘washed’ method. This gives the coffees a cleaner, brighter coffee like our Costa Rica San Antonio.

When the grower chooses the natural process, they take the whole cherries with the beans inside and leave them to dry. It is similar to how you might dry dates or raisins, preserving lots of flavour and giving the coffee more complexity. Once the cherries are perfectly dried, not too much and not too little, the fruit of the cherry is removed and the beans are ready. The natural method gives our luxury coffees a more fruity flavour with more body like our Brazilian Yellow Catuai. Whichever method the farmer chooses, both can produce high quality, luxury specialty coffee beans that we can roast to perfection.

We hope this blog has helped you understand a little of how the life of our coffees before they come to Boun Beans. We look for farmers who hand pick the ripest, sweetest coffee cherry and produce their coffee with the same care and consideration that we roast your coffee. Boun Beans then roasts these coffees to perfection, showcasing all of the great work the farmer does and bringing a unique, luxury product to you.