Bean To Cup

The delicious cup of stimulation that infuses its rich aroma through your Rombouts moment takes a massive amount of time and expertise to achieve. Here’s how:

The Bean

For a coffee seed to germinate it must be sown within two months of the harvest and will usually ‘move house’ twice before being allowed to grow into a coffee tree.

• At about six weeks, coffee seedlings are transplanted to shaded beds
• Six months later and some 50 cm tall, they are moved to the coffee plantation proper and are planted around two metres apart
• Now there’s a lengthy wait – for older varieties, the first crop of beans appears after five years and continues to appear for the following 25. The newer varieties produce beans after as soon as three years but only last for ten or so more
• A coffee tree is actually a shrub and the world’s coffee trade is dominated by two varieties: the Arabica and the Robusta (or, to give it its official name, the canephora)
• Blossoms appear and last for around eight weeks and on trees found very close to the equator, it is normal to have blossom, ripening fruit and ready-to-pick beans on the same branch all at the same time
• The petals resemble that of jasmine (in look and perfume) and resulted in the tree being called the Arabian Jasmine in the 17th Century
• The fruit of a coffee tree is called a cherry (or the ‘drupe’ in botanist-speak) and starts out life green in colour
• The cherry moves through several shades until it becomes red. It is now ready to pick
• Inside the cherry are two small green beans separated by a groove – this is coffee!

These green beans are the end of the first stage of creating your Rombouts moment. They will be harvested and eventually roast, ground and turned into the coffee we drink.