Coffee “beans” are not technically beans in the same way that soybeans and black beans and pinto beans are. They’re only “beans” in the sense that jelly beans and your cat’s toes are beans — they look like beans. Most other languages call them “coffee seeds” or “coffee grains”.
Brazil is the world’s biggest coffee producer, producing around a third of the world’s coffee. The plant was introduced to Brazil when a Portuguese spy seduced the wife of the governor of French Guiana and she gave him the gift of a bouquet with 30 coffee seeds hidden in it.
The average coffee farm is about 5 hectares of land–or about 1/8th the size of the Mall of America. Every year the average farm produces around eighty 70 kg bags of coffee. Peace Coffee roasts about that much coffee every 2 weekdays.
Each 12 oz bag of Peace Coffee contains around 2200-3300 coffee beans. This is equal to the harvest of one coffee tree, a 1 to 1 ratio, bag to tree!
Only about a quarter of a coffee bean consists of the water-soluble compounds that make coffee taste and act like coffee. There are about a thousand of these compounds that create seemingly infinite flavor notes in a cup of coffee. Red Wine only has 800, but we won’t hold it against them.
