Perhaps you’re running out the door with no time to brew a fresh pot, or you’ve just been given an intriguing bag of beans, and you can hardly wait to try a little bit. Maybe you’re just curious. Whatever the reasoning, if you wonder about eating coffee beans, you’ve come to the right place for answers.
The short answer is yes, you can eat coffee beans – but we will consider this question while looking at a handful of different varieties of beans.
What Are Coffee Cherries
Believe it or not, coffee begins as a fruit, like a cherry. The beans we know and love are the brutal inner pits of these strange fruits, so we will start at the beginning and talk about eating the fruit itself.
These little fruits don’t have much flesh around their seeds – just a thin layer of fiber and gooey substances – but if you were to peel away this flesh and taste it, you might be surprised. Because almost all of what we think of as distinctive coffee notes only come out during roasting, these cherries taste nothing like your morning cup.
Thanks to all this fleshy protection, coffee cherries taste remarkably sweet. If you’re super motivated to understand all that goes into creating coffee, it may be worth tasting a variety and thinking about how they compare. With enough practice, coffee connoisseurs can begin to pick out distinctive varietal differences in these cherries – and it’s these subtle variations hint at the dramatic differences present after roasting.
Green Beans – Can You Eat Raw Coffee Beans?
These so-called “green beans” are nothing like the vegetable. Green bean is simply a term for coffee beans that have been stripped of their fruit but have not yet been roasted.
Interestingly, beans in this stage are incredibly durable and resilient. Once appropriately dried, these beans can be shipped worldwide without too much worry. This means that – in many ways – green coffee beans are treated as a commodity, much like sugar or cotton. On their own, these beans are not particularly interesting, and their flavors are hardly varied at all.
It likely would not be too pleasant to bite into one of these tough little beans. Expect a woody texture and a tart taste. For this reason, snacking on green coffee beans has never really caught on – but we recommend going ahead and trying some if you’re curious.
Can You Eat Roasted Coffee Beans?
At this stage in processing these beans, we’ve finally arrived at something that should be familiar. Picture the hoppers of delicious-looking beans above your favorite baristas or the aromatic beans you can pick up at a grocery store – this is what we’re talking about now.
Though it’s not particularly common to eat these roasted beans independently, there are a few reasons you might. For example, coffee roasters routinely bite into roasted beans to monitor their process, and curious home baristas should have no qualms about sampling their beans before brewing
Roasting brings out all the exciting flavors and aromas in coffee. These beans will all have a pleasant taste, and they’ll all be slightly varied.
Feel free to chomp away on these beans – but be careful about eating too many. Since we’ve finally arrived at a form of coffee bean that’s quite enticing and may lead to a lot of snacking, it’s worth discussing the health benefits and concerns of eating coffee beans. check out Coffee Beans PH shop for fresh and Quality Coffee Beans
