The Coffee Plant: How Coffee Grows

Coffee comes from the seeds of a flowering shrub in the genus Coffea, most commonly the species arabica and robusta. Each plant produces fragrant white blossoms that develop into small red or purple fruits called cherries, and inside each cherry are the two seeds that, once dried and roasted, become the coffee "bean."

What Kind of Plant Is Coffee?

Coffee belongs to the genus Coffea, part of the Rubiaceae family, which also includes gardenias. Botanists recognize well over 120 wild Coffea species, but only a handful are grown commercially, almost all of it split between two: Coffea arabica and Coffea canephora, better known as robusta, according to Wikipedia's Coffea entry.

In the wild and on most farms, coffee grows as a shrub or small tree, typically reaching about 10 to 11.5 feet (3 to 3.5 meters) in the tropics, though commercial plantings are usually pruned much shorter to make picking easier.

What Do Coffee Flowers Look Like?

Coffee blossoms are small, white and strongly scented, often compared to jasmine, opening in dense clusters along the branches. On Coffea arabica, flowering typically begins three to four years after planting, and Wikipedia's entry on the species notes that flowers opening on sunny days go on to set the most berries.

Each bloom lasts only a few days before falling, which is why a coffee farm in full flower is such a brief, striking sight, and why growers watch flowering closely: it foreshadows the harvest to come many months later.

What Is a Coffee Cherry?

Once pollinated, coffee flowers develop into small fruits called cherries, which ripen from green to red or, in some varieties, yellow or purple. Botanically, the fruit is classified as either an epigynous berry or an indehiscent drupe depending on the source consulted, according to Wikipedia's entry on the Coffea genus.

Inside each cherry are, in most cases, two flat-sided seeds facing each other. About 5 to 10 percent of cherries instead produce a single, rounder seed known as a peaberry, a natural variation rather than a separate variety.

Is Coffee a Fruit? Is It Really a "Bean"?

Yes, and no, in that order. The coffee cherry is genuinely a fruit — botanists describe it as a berry or a drupe — which makes coffee, agriculturally speaking, a fruit crop much like a cherry orchard or an olive grove. What roasters and drinkers call the "bean" is actually the fruit's seed, not a bean in the botanical sense, since true beans come from legumes such as soy or kidney beans. The name stuck simply because the seed's shape and size resemble one.

How Long Until a Coffee Plant Produces Its First Harvest?

A coffee tree needs patience. Coffea arabica typically begins flowering three to four years after planting, and Wikipedia's Coffea entry puts the first real harvest at roughly three to five years, though a tree isn't considered fully mature for around seven years. Once established, a healthy tree can keep producing for an average of 50 to 60 years, and sometimes up to a century, before yields decline enough to warrant replanting.

Are Arabica and Robusta the Only Coffee Species Grown?

Arabica and robusta dominate the world's cups, together making up roughly 55 and 45 percent of production, according to Wikipedia's Coffea entry, but they aren't the only species harvested. Liberica and its close relative excelsa are grown on a much smaller scale, mostly in West Africa and parts of Southeast Asia, distinguished by larger leaves and larger cherries than either arabica or robusta produces. Coffea itself is a large genus: Wikipedia counts well over 120 recognized wild species, the overwhelming majority of which are never grown commercially at all.

How Is Coffee Harvested?

Because cherries on the same branch don't all ripen together, harvesting coffee is largely a matter of picking ripe fruit while leaving green cherries for a later pass. Farms use one of two broad approaches: selective picking, where workers return to the same trees repeatedly over several weeks to hand-pick only ripe cherries, or strip picking, where an entire branch is stripped at once regardless of ripeness, usually by machine on flatter land.

Selective picking is slower and costs more, but it produces more consistent quality, since it avoids mixing under- and over-ripe fruit into the same batch, one reason many mountainous, low-yield specialty origins still pick entirely by hand rather than by machine. The species also matters: robusta plants generally need less pesticide and herbicide than arabica, since they're less susceptible to pests and disease, a trait that shapes how each is farmed as much as elevation does.

What happens after picking determines the cherry's fate almost as much as the harvest itself: growers separate the two seeds from the surrounding fruit through washing, drying the fruit whole, or a method somewhere between the two, before the seeds are hulled, sorted, roasted and, only then, ground into what most people simply call coffee.