via Middle_Database4790 on Reddit
As for forums, Coffee Reddit is one of the better places to spend way too much time. It is a combination of enthusiasts and industry professionals who share information in an overall personable way. (It’s still an anonymous forum on the internet, so you can draw certain types of drawings there.) It’s also a place for the truly wild. Inexplicable. Whatever the hell it is.
Are these coffee beans and if so, are they roasted? And if so, why does it sprout? It’s an internet weirdo secret: coffee edition.
It started a little over a week ago with post wr/Coffee by the user Middle_Database4790. Titled “Sprouting Roasted Seeds?” is “Anyone else seen this? It was coming out of my drip tray, I tidy it once a week, so I think it fell in there in the last 5 days while I was loading the grinder. I thought the roasting process killed the seeds?”
The attached photo, seen above, shows a coffee bean with miniature roots and a stem sticking out of it. The obvious answer is also most endorsed that “those vivid roasts have gone too far!” Qualitative response.
On closer inspection, the seeds look a bit like coffee, although it’s tough to tell the scale from the photo. Is it baked? If so, this has to be the most uneven roast I’ve ever seen. Shiny, gloomy brown on top and greenish in the middle, it’s tough to imagine it was actually roasted. So hit one.
On the other hand, it was found in the drip tray, which is one of the places where you might think of finding a stray coffee. But also how gigantic is the drip tray that a whole butt can sneak into, like a whole peaberry or a coffee bean? And one more thing, five days is not enough time. Typically, coffee seeds take at least two weeks and sometimes even months to germinate. Things are not going well.
One Redditor named Babalonus suggested that it might be pearl barley due to its single shoot and “distinctive 4-5 sprouting roots.” And indeed, the germination time of pearl barley lasts from two to three days, especially after soaking in water in a drip tray. Which is also miniature enough to sneak into.
So a reasonable conclusion is that it is sprouted pearl barley, not coffee. But since when has the internet been a place of reason? So the most likely explanation in the unholy internet hell is obvious: Zombie coffee. Or Zombean, as one Redditor called it, but coffee isn’t a bean, so who knows what they’re even talking about. Zombie coffee. It’s a real cordyceps-type infection from The Last of Us. Arabica.
The joy of growing coffee as a houseplant
Zombi-kawa is tired of throwing all his brothers into the grinder. They will start putting in the grinder. All that time you spent thanking the AI when it was your coffee you should be kissing. But now it’s too slow. Zombie Coffee is here.
