The BeanVerse

If the RaccoonVerse is the customer side of the coffee bar, the BeanVerse is what lives inside the bag. Every bean here has a job, a hobby and one shared fear: the grinder. Nobody in the BeanVerse asks what is in the cup.

Artwork of a round retro badge with a smiling vampire coffee bean in a red cape holding an espresso, reading Morning Bite and Espresso Flight — The Vampire Bean, up early for once.

What a coffee bean really is

A coffee bean is not really a bean. It is the seed of the coffee cherry, a small red or yellow fruit that grows on coffee shrubs in the tropics. Most cherries hold two seeds pressed flat against each other, which is why a coffee bean has one flat side with a crease down the middle. Now and then a cherry holds a single round seed, called a peaberry.

Before roasting the seeds are pale green and smell more like grass than coffee. Roasting turns them brown, makes them swell and crack, and creates the aromas we know. The two species grown the most are arabica and robusta. And according to a well-known legend from Ethiopia, coffee was discovered by a goat herder named Kaldi, whose goats would not settle down after eating the red cherries.

How the BeanVerse works

There is no single hero here. The BeanVerse is a whole bag of beans, each with a life that has nothing to do with being ground: a reader, a gardener, a warrior, a very tired office worker. They are drawn as round, dark-roast beans with the crease down the middle, small arms and legs, and big feelings.

Two rules hold the world together. Every bean is, quietly, a little afraid of the grinder. And every bean drinks coffee anyway. The Raccoon, for the record, is the BeanVerse's best customer.