A coffee bean is the seed of the coffee plant. It is the pit inside the red or purple fruit often referred to as a cherry. Even though it is a seed, it is referred to as ‘bean’ because of its resemblance to true bean.

The fruits / coffee cherries /coffee berries contain two stones with their flat sides together. A small percentage of cherries or pea berries contain a single bean.

The two most economically important varieties of coffee plant are the Arabica and the Robusta. 75-80% of the coffee produced worldwide is Arabica and 20% is Robusta.

Arabica beans consist of 0.8-1.4% and Robusta beans consist of 1.7-4% caffeine. Coffee beans are a major cash crop and an important export product.

The United States imports more coffee than any other nation. The average person in the United States consumed 4.09kg (9lbs) of coffee in the year 2009.

The picture I recollect in my mind of a US cop is a tall person with an expanding midriff resembling the dough nut he has in one hand and a mug of half liter black(?)coffee in the other!

When the fruit is ripe, it is almost always handpicked, using either selective picking, where only the ripe fruit is removed or strip-picking, where all of the fruit is removed from a branch all at once.

Because a tree can have both ripe and unripe berries at the same time, one area of crop has to be picked several times, making harvesting the most labor intensive process of coffee bean production.

There are two methods of processing the coffee berries. The first method is wet processing, which is usually carried out in Central America and areas of Africa. The flesh of the berries is separated from the seeds and then the beans are fermented – soaked in water for about two days.

This dissolves any pulp or sticky residue that may still be attached to the beans. The beans are then washed and dried in the sun, or, in the case of commercial manufacturers, in drying machines.

The dry processing method is cheaper and simpler, used for lower quality beans in Brazil and much of Africa. Twigs and other foreign objects are separated from the berries and the fruit is then spread out in the sun on cement or brick for 2–3 weeks, turned regularly for even drying. The dried pulp is removed from the beans afterward.

After processing has taken place, the husks are removed and the beans are roasted, which gives them their varying brown color, and they can then be sorted for bagging.