What Is a Coffee Cherry?

You may not know this, but coffee is a fruit. So you may ask why do we drink it instead of eating it?

Most people think of coffee as a dark, bitter, and caffeinated drink made from brownish beans; the darker, the better. However, you’ve probably never looked at coffee from a purely biological point of view. If you do so, you get a different picture. Coffee beans are not beans at all; they are the seeds of the coffee cherry, which is a fruit.

What Is a Coffee Plant?

The coffee plant is a fruit tree with fruits that look much like berries. They start off as green, and as they become riper, they turn red. After the berries are harvested, the skin and pulp are removed to expose the seeds. When roasted, the seeds are known as coffee beans.

Can You Eat Coffee Cherries?

We think of fruits as being sweet and delicious. However, that’s not how nature works, and some fruits are not ideal for fruit salads and smoothies. We don’t realize this because nearly all of the fruits we come across in our everyday life have been selected and refined to make them enjoyable to eat.

Coffee cherries never turned out to be as popular with people as regular cherries or strawberries because there’s just no point in eating them from a nutritional perspective. So yes, a coffee cherry is edible, and some animals enjoy snacking on them. The well-known legend of how coffee was discovered is because an Ethiopian goatherder noticed that his goats appeared to be dancing after dining on coffee cherries. For more on this check out our blog on dancing goats!

So, What Does a Coffee Cherry Taste Like?

If you bite into a coffee cherry, you’ll realize straight away that it’s mostly skin and seeds. The skin is quite rough, and the pulp sticks to the seeds and makes them slimy. The main problem here is that there isn’t much fruit flesh to speak of. However, what flesh there is in a ripe coffee cherry tastes rather pleasant. It’s sweet and fresh – a bit like a watermelon mixed with an apricot. 

Caffeine Is Why We Use Coffee Cherries

Humans did not begin to cultivate the coffee plant because of the flavor of its fruit. What we fell in love with was the coffee cherry’s stimulating effect. However, you probably don’t know that caffeine serves as the coffee plant’s mechanism for defending itself against pests.

Depulped coffee seeds are still extremely dense. If you attempt to grind them unroasted, your grinder is not going to thank you. However, when roasted, the beans become brittle and easy to grind and make that delicious brew that we all enjoy. The taste of the coffee beverage and the coffee fruit do not have much in common.

You Can Drink the Coffee Cherry

If you’re curious about tasting the flavor of the coffee cherry, you can try cascara. After the cherries have been depulped, the coffee skin is carefully dried and made into coffee cherry tea or cascara. This tea is sweet and refreshing with a unique coffee cherry flavor and caffeine on the same level as black tea. You can even eat cascara; it’s a bit like eating dried cranberries or raisins. If you want to try cascara, make sure it’s from a reputable source, as some people speculate that mold and mycotoxins can quickly grow on it. It’s worth mentioning that the European Union has placed a ban on selling cascara until further studies have been carried out.

Where to Buy the Best Roasted Coffee Beans

At Operant Coffee, we make it our mission to supply you with only the very best Fair Trade Coffee from ecologically sustainable coffee farms. Check out our store and choose a blend that appeals to your coffee tastebuds. We guarantee that it will taste like coffee and not coffee cherries!