The Coffee Cycle
From a flower on an Ethiopian hillside to the cup in your hands. Follow the journey down the page.
Coffee isn't manufactured, it's grown, and it grows on a cycle that repeats every season.
Stage 01
Flowering
Once a year, coffee trees burst into bloom with fragrant white flowers. Each bloom lasts just a few days before giving way to fruit.
Stage 02
Cherry Growth
The flowers become small green cherries, which slowly ripen over several months, turning from green to yellow to a deep red.
Stage 03
Harvest
Ripe cherries are picked, often by hand, one at a time, since cherries on the same branch don't all ripen together.
Stage 04
Processing
The fruit is removed to reveal the green coffee bean inside, usually two beans per cherry, then dried and prepared for roasting.
Stage 05
Roasting
Green beans travel to Quad Coffee Lab in South Bend, where we roast in micro-batches to bring out each bean's natural character.
Stage 06
Brewing
The roasted beans become your cup, brewed the way you like it. Then, on the tree, next season's flowers begin again.
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And then it begins again.
Worth knowing
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Only A Few Days
Coffee flowers bloom in creamy white clusters, and last only two to three days before falling, leaving behind the cherries that become your coffee.
It's Actually A Fruit
Coffee "beans" aren't beans at all, they're the seeds inside a coffee cherry, a real fruit that starts green and ripens to red.
Born In Ethiopia
Every coffee plant on Earth traces its roots back to Ethiopia, home to more coffee plant diversity than anywhere else in the world.
A Three Year Wait
A coffee tree takes three to four years after planting before it produces its first harvestable cherries. Patience is part of the recipe.
The Top 5 To 10%
Specialty grade coffee, like ours, scores 80 or higher on the SCA Q scale. Only the top 5 to 10 percent of beans grown worldwide qualify.
Discovered By A Goat Herder
Legend says coffee was first discovered by Kaldi, an Ethiopian goat herder whose goats got a little too energetic after eating coffee cherries. Read the full legend →