Green coffee
also: green beans, unroasted coffee
Unroasted coffee beans, as traded and stored before they are roasted into the brown beans you brew.
Green coffee is the seed of the coffee cherry after it has been processed, dried, and hulled but before it is roasted. The beans are pale green to bluish or yellowish, dense, and grassy-smelling. This is the form coffee is traded, shipped, and stored in worldwide, because unroasted beans keep far longer than roasted ones.
Why it matters: green coffee is where almost all of a coffee’s potential is set. Variety, origin and altitude, processing, and drying are all baked in before roasting begins. A roaster can reveal or waste that potential, but cannot add quality that is not already in the bean.
Stored well (cool, dry, stable moisture around 10 to 12 percent), good green coffee holds quality for many months, often a year or more, before slowly fading to a flat, baggy, woody character. That shelf stability is exactly why home roasters buy green: you control freshness by roasting small amounts on demand. See roast-levels-explained for what happens next.