Coffee Beans from the Cherry: Dried, Hulled and Roasted

A coffee bean is the seed of a red fruit like a cherry, two to a fruit. In Yemen, Andrew Ure wrote in 1839, the fruit was dried on mats, rolled to break the husks, winnowed and dried again. Roasting turns the hard green seed brown and fragrant, and how much weight it loses tells you how dark it has gone. The picture: coffee roasted in a pan for an Ethiopian coffee ceremony.