Where does your morning cup of coffee comes from?

Recently I was building a drip chlorination system in a town where they grow coffee, and I was given a bag of partially processed coffee as a gift. The beans were small and brown and had a weird shell, and I had absolutely no idea what to do with it. This is the way I learned the coffee harvesting process...

First, you need a coffea tree/plant. Yes, coffee comes from the fruit of a tree! And, not to be confused with cacao (I had thought they were the same bean just processed differently - but this is wrong). So, you find a coffee plant like the one shown below and you pick the red berries. You can eat these, they are actually sweet and good tasting (I ate one), but you won't eat the pit. The pit is where the coffee seed is. 

Once you pick some of these red coffee berries, you need to take-off the edible fruit part. Since this is a lot of work to do by hand, or a lot of fruit to eat, most people here have a grinder that conveniently separates the fruit from the seeds. The fruit shells come out the front of the grinder and the seeds out the back. See below, it is still very hard work to turn the wheel of the grinder. 

Once you have your bag of seed pits, you need to wash them because they are slimy (kinda like grape seeds). Once you wash off the remains of the slimy fruit part, you are ready to dry your seeds. Here in Peru, people spread it out on large pieces of plastic and let the sun naturally dry it. Depending on how much sun you have, it can take 1-10 days to "sufficiently" dry the seeds. And hopefully not too many street dogs walk over your coffee in the meantime ;)

This is the state that I received my coffee in - partially dried out in the sun. So, I needed to dry my coffee out a little more. The way you check to see if the coffee is sufficiently dry is to bite into a seed (tho I am not sure what people are looking for when they do this, but they do this and tell me it's not dry enough). So, I laid my coffee out to dry in the sun for another day. See below.

Once the coffee is "sufficiently" dry, you need to get the dry, hard shells off of it. This you can do by hand (again, very time consuming, like shelling peanuts), so what most people do is adjust their grinder to a looser setting, and they grind off this outer shell. Now you have what they call here "green coffee". This is sold in the market for 10 peruvian soles per kilogram. That's roughly $3 for 2.2lbs of coffee. Quite a bit of work for not a lot of money. 

With your green coffee, all you need to do is roast and grind it. You can roast it in a pot or pan, on low heat, stirring continuously, with a wooden spoon not plastic (I melted a plastic spatula), until your coffee is nice and roasted to your liking. There is another layer of dry shell that tends to come off in the roasting process (and burn), but you can take your roasted coffee outside and pour it from one bowl to another and let the wind blow away these burnt pieces. Otherwise your coffee may have a burnt flavor.

Finally, you can grind up your coffee and enjoy!