Coffee may be the second most traded commodity in the whole world but it isn’t exactly one of the easiest products to cultivate. With most of the world’s coffee sources coming from small family farms and a single tree only producing a pound of roasted coffee beans every year, it’s really remarkable how coffee doesn’t fall short when it comes to supplying the its global demands.
Aside from the painstaking process of growing and gathering coffee, other factors also give us a better idea of why we should learn to appreciate coffee even more. Ever heard of the “Peaberry anomaly”?
Coffee trees usually produce fruits that have beans that split into two. However, one out of ten or almost more than 5 percent of all coffee beans, regardless of variety, yield beans that come as single seeds instead of the usual two halves making it look like chia seeds. This is a botanical anomaly known as a “peaberry”.
Peaberry or also known as caracoli, occurs when only one part of the seed gets fertilized. As the bean develops, only one part of the seed eventually matures. This process gives it that pea-like round appearance; probably why they called it the “peaberry” anomaly.
According to legend, the peaberry was believed to have possessed mystical properties and is given high value by many people before. While proof of this so-called power never really came to existence, some believe that the round coffee bean roasts faster because of its shape. It also allows equal distribution of heat transfer during the roasting process. Ironically, researchers also believe that the distinct quality of the peaberry bean doesn’t make it totally unique in the sense that it may possess far greater properties than the usual two-halved coffee beans. Evidence of this shows why gatherers have isolated these weird looking beans to avoid the roasting inconsistency. The process of carefully picking out the round beans meant higher quality and the labor needed to do this even added more value to the peaberry bean.
It may seem like an anomaly, but this unique instance has actually made us realize how important coffee really is to us and to world we live in.
