Coffee Glossary · Coffee Basics
Coffee Cherry
The fruit of the coffee tree — a small drupe that ripens from green through yellow to deep red (or yellow/orange in some varieties), containing two seeds that become coffee beans. Cherry quality sets the ceiling for everything downstream: sugar content at picking determines sweetness potential, and only fully ripe cherries make specialty grade. 'Cherry selection' — picking ripe fruit only — is the single most important quality act in coffee, which is why Volcana pays farmers premiums specifically for ripeness discipline.
Related terms
Mucilage
The sticky, sugar-rich fruit layer clinging to parchment after the cherry's skin is pulped away. What happens…
Parchment (Pergamino)
The papery protective husk around each coffee seed, exposed after pulping and retained through drying in…
Hand Sorting
The final human quality gate: workers — overwhelmingly women, at origin after origin — picking defective…
Arabica (Coffea arabica)
The species behind roughly 60% of world coffee and nearly all specialty-grade lots. Arabica evolved in…
Green Coffee
Coffee in its internationally traded form: the dried, milled seed of the coffee cherry before roasting,…
Peaberry
A natural mutation in which a cherry develops one round seed instead of the usual two flat-faced beans —…
Reading up before buying? Volcana Coffee exports SGS-inspected specialty Arabica and Fine Robusta from the Bolaven Plateau, Laos — and we're happy to walk new importers through every term on a real offer sheet.
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