Posted on Feb 2, 2012
One more note on areas in which coffee is grown: there are a couple of factors that can influence the yield of an area’s coffee-growing potential. First, many local coffee farmers can face a lot of challenges in growing coffee because of slow yield – sometimes as long as two to five years. Their place in the world with respect to political and financial issues can also create a number of challenges for growing coffee; many underdeveloped countries often produce great coffee and could produce more if it were not for these challenges. Other challenges faced by coffee growers include the fact that coffee plants are considered highly “parasitic” in that they absorb and demand much of the nutrients in the available soil, depleting the resources available for other plants and trees. This means that coffee plants are difficult to plant around other plants that may yield valuable crops as well. In many cases, farmers simply grow coffee because it’s so hard to grow other plants along with the...
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Posted on Jan 30, 2012
Today, the world is still split between the two major types of coffees: robusta and arabica, or Coffea canephora and Coffea arabica. Many people prefer the taste of arabica coffee, but robusta coffee – though considered more bitter – is believed to have a fuller “body.” For this reason, both types of coffee are still cultivated worldwide, with different countries cultivating more of one or the other. In some cases, countries will cultivate large amounts of both types of coffee. All types of coffee in their unroasted form are called a term that is known as green coffee. Green coffee: Term used to refer to coffee beans that are unroasted. In their natural state, coffee beans are actually green, though they turn dark brown and then black when roasted. In judging which countries cultivate and produce the most amount of coffee, the term “green coffee” is often used. In the most recent available data (2010), the top producers of green coffee by weight were: Brazil: 2.8 million tonnes Vietnam: 1.1 million Indonesia: 801,000 Colombia: 514,000 India: 290,000 Ethiopia: 270,000 Peru: 264,000 Guatemala: 257,000 Mexico: 253,000 Honduras: 229,000 As you can see, the top producers of coffee tend to be equatorial (or near-equatorial countries) that have the ideal climate, soil, and altitudes for growing...
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Posted on Jan 26, 2012
Throughout much of the history repeated here, of course, the coffee being traded was single origin coffee. Before the Industrial Revolution, there was no way to mass produce or transport enough coffee that any other option would become available. But as time went on, the methods and geographical locations of cultivation contributed to the development of different varieties of coffee, which meant that the origin of the coffee beans themselves had an impact on the taste of the coffee you were brewing. This might seem like common sense to coffee addicts today – who have access to coffee beans of different types and different roasts from all over the world – but only a few centuries ago this would have been considered a new development. Perhaps the first different popular variety of coffee separate from the basic Arabica variety began on an island off of the east coast of Madagascar known as the Isle of Bourbon – also known as Reunion in French. When coffee was cultivated there, it actually produced coffee beans that were smaller – so significantly, in fact, that this became known as a different variety of Arabica known as “Bourbon.” Different types of coffees grown in Mexico and Brazil were actually the “descendants,” if you will, of this Bourbon coffee, which contributed to a greater variety in flavor and texture of coffee depending on where in the world the coffee was grown. That’s why Bourbon coffee is one of the first instances that the idea of single-origin coffee. Brazil’s natural coffee-friendly climate (as well as a number of other factors like altitude and soil that will be explored in the section on South America) eventually led to its dominance in the coffee trade in portions of the 19th and 20th...
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Posted on Jan 23, 2012
Much of the Arabian history is well documented because of the work of Abd Al-Qadir al-Jaziri, who wrote a comprehensive treatise on the subject in 1587. This work reported that in Arabia, coffee was first used for its energizing purposes in Aden, which is not far from Mocha. Mocha’s location in Yemen puts it smack-dab on the southwest coast of the Arabian Peninsula, right across the Red Sea from Africa and the Middle Age regions of northwestern Ethiopia. This made exportation of coffee beans from its native Ethiopia to the Arabian world quite easy, and the bean found its way into the Arabian subcontinent through both Yemen and Egypt. Once discovered in Arabia, it was then roasted and brewed so that it took the appearance of coffee that we would today recognize as the beverage. Needless to say, its energizing effects proved to make coffee a favorite morning beverage, as noted by the German physician Leonhard Rauwolf in the 16th century who had taken a trip to the Near East. Mocha, in Yemen, was the world capital of coffee between the 15th and 17th centuries – and even after coffee had spread farther the Mocha bean enjoyed an enduring popularity that continues to this day. However, it’s no surprise that the energizing beverage started to produce some “buzz” and eventually spread to other places in the Middle East, as well as regions as far-ranging as Persia and Turkey to North Africa. After encountering the bean first in Ethiopia, coffee growers in Yemen started cultivating the plant in Arabia. It was rarely exported over long distances from Yemen – and when it was, it was usually boiled in order to remain sterilized. In the 17th century, as legend has it, a Sufi named Baba Budan smuggled a few fresh coffee beans (which, as you’ll remember, are actually the pits of the seeds) to India for the purposes of cultivation – an event that could have contributed to the further spread of coffee throughout the world and the decline of Mocha as the coffee “capital” of the...
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Posted on Jan 23, 2012
Considering that coffee’s emergence in Europe also coincided with the expansion of Europe into the New World – that is, the newly-discovered North and South Americas – it’s no surprise that coffee did not take a long time to spread to what was essentially across the globe. In fact, it was the discovery of some of these lands (as well as new discoveries constantly being made during the Age of Exploration) that revealed to Europeans that much of the land in the Americas was well-suited for growing coffee. For example, a man named Gabriel de Clieu brought coffee seeds to Martinique in the Caribbean in the early 18th century and it turned out that the climate, altitude, and soil were ideal for growing coffee. This lead to coffee seeds being spread throughout the Caribbean, including Hispaniola, Mexico, and throughout the Caribbean islands. As the influence of coffee grown in the Americas became more and more significant, coffee became a product that helped contribute to the existence of companies like the British and Dutch East India Companies. Though the spice trade still often dominated the demand for international waterways, coffee was a dependable product that helped spur further exploration and cultivation of the Americas. The cultivation of coffee throughout the Americas continued over the centuries, especially as certain countries like Brazil earned their independence and had a greater reliance on homegrown resources to spur economic growth. Though coffee was first introduced to Brazil in 1727, for example, the cultivation did not begin in full force until Brazil gained its independence in the early 19th...
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