Coffee cherry
also: coffee fruit, cherry
The fruit of the coffee plant; usually holding two seeds, the beans we eventually roast.
The coffee cherry is the fruit of the coffee plant. Each one is a small, round fruit, roughly the size of a grape, that ripens from green to a deep red (or yellow, depending on variety). Inside the sweet pulp sit, typically, two flat-sided seeds facing each other: the “beans” we eventually roast.
Why it matters: everything in your cup starts here. The cherry’s ripeness at picking sets the ceiling on quality, which is why careful producers hand-pick only ripe fruit. The layers of the cherry, skin, pulp, sticky mucilage, and the parchment around each seed, are what processing must navigate, and how they are handled (see washed and natural) shapes the final flavor.
In the workflow, cherries are picked, then processed to free the seeds, which are dried and milled into green-coffee for export. Occasionally a cherry develops just one round seed instead of two, called a peaberry. The dried cherry skin is even brewed on its own as cascara.