You may get your coffee from coffee vending machines (like those by Pour Moi), you might get it from coffee shops or you might buy your own beans, but have you ever considered how coffee beans get from origin to shop? It’s an interesting process.

Coffee beans grow on shrubs in warm climates such as Africa, Latin America and southern Asia. They are actually inside coffee berries at this stage and they are a fleshy berry on the evergreen bush of the Coffea. They go through several processes before they get to become the coffee you see in a shop.

Plants have to be a few years old before they produce anything useful and at the point that the berries ripen from green to red, they are ready to be picked.

The berries are collected (either by hand or mechanically). If the berries are taken off by hand, the ripe ones can be harvested, leaving the others to continue ripening. If strip picked, the entire crop is harvested at the same time, whether by machine or by hand.

The flesh then needs to be removed to get at the seeds (beans) inside. This can be done in two ways - the wet or the dry method.

In the wet method, the berries are added to water to sort the good ones from the bad. The berries are forced through a screen and some of the pulp is removed. To get rid of the rest of the pulp, they are fermented and then washed in clean water or mechanically scrubbed. The beans are then dried in the sun or by machine.

In the dry method, the berries are spead out in the sun on large sheets. They are turned frequently and protected from rain. It can take several weeks to dry the berries to the required amount. This is the traditional method and ideal for places where water is in short supply.

The next stage is to hull the beans to take off any remaining layers of berry. This can leave behind silvery skin which can be removed if the beans are polished (an optional process). The now clean and dry beans are sorted by size, colour and density. This part of production is called Milling.

Some people like their coffee to have an aged flavour. The taste for this came about because the first coffee to arrive in Europe was brought on boats and took many weeks to make the journey.

The green beans need to be roasted to turn them into the coffee you buy in supermarkets. They are put into a drum and heated. They are kept on the move to stop them burning. It changes the physical and chemical properties of the beans. It is actually this process that gives the characteristic flavours because the heat causes the beans to expand and change in taste, density, colour and smell. At an internal temperature of approximately 400 degrees, the tasty oils (caffeol) start to come to the surface. The degree to which the beans are roasted will determine the flavour.

The beans all darken during roasting. Light roasts are ones such as cinnamon roast or New England, medium roasts are those such as American, and strong roasts are those such as Viennese.

Once roasted to the desired degree, the beans are taken out of the drum and cooled.

The roasted beans can be packaged for the consumer to grind at home, or they can be ground before they are packaged and sold on for home use.