Coffee beans drying. Photo: william.neuheisel, Flickr

Erin Meister trains baristas for North Carolina-based Counter Culture Coffee and sporadically maintains the blog Meet the Press Pot from her home in New York City. This is part of a series of tips for the caffeine-addicted.

Hey, wait a sec! Are you really about to dump out the rest of the too-big coffee you ordered this morning, drank a third of, forgot about and let get lukewarm? Come on, pal -- you think this stuff grows on trees?

Well, actually, it kind of does -- except they're more like bushes. And the beans that we enjoy roasted, ground and percolated in the morning are actually seeds, not beans: They're more like a cherry pit than any legume you put in your famous Super Bowl Sunday chili. And much like every other fresh fruit or vegetable we enjoy, the beauty and deliciousness of a coffee is fleeting, seasonal and really labor intensive.

Read more about coffee's journey from seed to cup after the jump.

For starters, the average coffee plant takes five years to mature enough to bear fruit. (Just like human offspring, it has to be fed and sheltered until it's old enough to earn its keep.) Once the bush is fertile, it still takes nine months for the cherry to develop after the plant blooms. The resulting fruit ripens a bit randomly over the course of several weeks, meaning you may have bright green unripe fruit on the same branch as vivid red ripe ones and burgundy-purple overripes. For this reason, super-high-quality coffee is hand-picked by workers trained to reach only for cherry-hued fruit at its peak, even returning to the same plant over and over.

Coffee ripening on a branch. Photo: lrargerich, Flickr

Once the fruit's removed from the branch, it's gotta get gussied up for sale and export. Some coffees are washed, meaning the fruit's skin and pulp are removed by water and the bean is dried in its parchment (which is like the skin around an in-shell peanut). Other coffees are dried without the cherry skin but encased in its grape-guts-like goo. Another type might be dried with the whole fruit intact on the bean. There are also many variations in between. Because coffee beans are organic matter, drying them is tricky and requires absolute vigilance.

In some places, the beans are turned constantly, 24 hours a day, with long rakes until dry to ensure they don't develop mold. From there the beans get sorted, often by hand and at dizzying speed:

Once the coffee is dried, sorted and bagged, it gets sold to buyers worldwide, often taking a long oceanic voyage to reach its final destination. Only then does it get roasted, packaged and sold to wherever you normally pick up your next batch to brew at home or that perfect morning latte.

Who knew all that work could amount to a (literal) hill of beans?