Coffee Nomad

Can you believe the fruit pictured below is actually coffee?  For good reason, coffee is referred to as “cherries” during its initial ripening stages.

As you can tell by this picture, the coffee fruit goes from green to yellow to red.  This is why it is necessary to hand pick them, because they don’t all ripen at once, and only the red ones should be harvested.  At the same time, it is important to pick the ripened “cherries” once they have become red.

There are two coffee beans preserved within each cherry.  Thousands of beans are required to make one pound of coffee so it is somewhat miraculous that, with all the human labor that goes into making coffee, it is still so affordable.