As far as forums go, Coffee Reddit is one of the better places to spend entirely too much time. It’s a blend of enthusiasts and industry professionals sharing information in a generally congenial fashion. (It is still an anonymous forum on the internet, so that can draw a certain type.) It is also a place for the truly wild. The unexplainable. The… whatever the hell this is.
Is that a coffee seed and if so is it roasted? And if so why is it sprouting? It’s an internet weirdo mystery: coffee edition.
It originated a little over a week ago with a post to r/Coffee by user Middle_Database4790. Titled “Sprouting roasted seed?,” it reads, “Anyone else seen this before? It came out of my drip tray, I clean it once a week so I think this dropped in there over the last 5 days whilst loading my grinder. I thought the roasting process killed the seed?”
The accompanying photo, seen above, has what appears to be a coffee seed with small roots and a stem protruding from it. The obvious response is also the most upvoted one, that “these light roasts have gone too far!” Quality response.
Upon closer look, the seed is vaguely coffee looking, though the scale is hard to determine from the photo. Is it roasted? If it is, it is maybe the most uneven roast I have ever seen. Shiny and dark brown at the top and greenish in the middle, it is hard to imagine that it was actually roasted. So strike one.
On the other hand it was found in a drip tray, which is one of the more likely places one would think to find an errant coffee. But also how big is that drip tray that a whole ass, like peaberry whole, coffee seed can sneak its way in? And another thing, five days isn’t enough time. It normally takes at least two weeks for a coffee seed to sprout, sometime even months. Things aren’t adding up.
One Redditor by the name of Babalonus suggested that it may be pearl barley due to its singular shoot and “characteristic 4-5 sprouting roots.” And indeed, the time to sprout for pearl barley is two to three days, especially soaking in water a la drip tray. Which is also small enough to sneak into.
So the reasonable conclusion is that it’s pearl barley sprouting and not coffee. But since when has the internet been a place for reason? Thus the actual most likely explanation, in the cursed internet hellscape sort of way, is obvious: Zombie coffee. Or Zombean as one Redditor called it, but coffee isn’t a bean, so who knows they are even talking about. Zombie coffee. It’s some real The Last of Us cordyceps-type infection. The Arabicus.
The zombified coffee is sick of all their brethren being put in the grinder. They’re going to start putting you in the grinder. All that time you spent thanking artificial intelligence when it was your coffee you should have been kissing up to. But it’s too late now. Zombie coffee is here.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
