Hi , login or create a new account below

While people are drinking their cup of freshly brewed coffee, they would feel alive and less grumpy, but there are some coffees that do not come to your tongue's liking. Kenneth Davids asks why is that so?

Coffee tend to be this way due to the soil and water they are growing in, there are some studies that are done about the geographical situations and method of growing.

The things that are growing beside coffee trees are also a factor of how they taste and smell. Like the coffee from Guatemala, they have a wide range of coffees that taste like chocolate all the way to flowers.

Latin American

Latin-American coffees are grown all along the mountainous backbone of Latin America, from southern Mexico south through Central America, Colombia and Bolivia to Peru, as well as in the highlands of the larger islands of the Caribbean and on the high plateaus of Brazil.

At their best, the classic coffees of Latin-American manifest bright, lively acidity and a clean, straightforward cup. They provide what for a North American is a normative good coffee experience. Within this very broad family of coffees, however, there are many variations in cup and character.

The very highest grown coffees of Central America and Colombia tend to be boldly and intensely acidy and full-bodied. These are the coffees that attract coffee purists of the old school. Caribbean coffees, including the celebrated Jamaica Blue Mountain, tend at their best to be big-bodied and roundly balanced with rich, low-key acidity.

The best Nicaraguas are meaty and full-bodied. Lower grown coffees from Central America tend to be soft and round in profile, as are the often exquisitely sweet coffees of Peru. The character of the classic Latin-American cup derives in part from the clarity of flavour achieved through wet-processing.

The coffees of Brazil offer a different world of experience based on a much wider variety of processing methods, from dry-processing, which produces the classic Brazil Santos cup, low-toned, spicily complex and rich, to semi-dry or pulped natural processing, which promotes a softly complex, delicately fruity cup, to classic wet-processing, which produces a cleanly understated, pleasingly low-acid cup much like the one offered by the finer lower grown coffees of Central America.

The highlands of Guatemala produce several of the world's finest and most distinctive coffees. The mountain basin surrounding the austerely beautiful colonial city Guatemala Antigua produces the most distinguished of these highland coffees: Guatemala Antigua, a coffee that combines complex nuance (smoke, spice, flowers, occasionally chocolate) with acidity ranging from gently bright to austerely powerful.

Fraijanes displays similar cup characteristics. Other Guatemala coffees, perhaps because they are more exposed to wet ocean weather than the mountain-protected Antigua basin, tend to display slightly softer, often less powerful, but equally complexly nuanced profiles.

These softer Guatemalas include Coban, admired for its fullish body and gentle, deep, rounded profile, Huehuetenango from the Caribbean-facing slopes of the central mountain range, and San Marcos coffees from the Pacific-facing slopes. Coffees from the basin surrounding Lake Atitlan in south central Guatemala typically offer the same complex nuance as Antiguas but are lighter in body and brighter in flavour.

Africa

Some of the world's most distinctive coffees are grown in East Africa along a long north-south axis that starts at the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula in Yemen and concludes in Zimbabwe in southern Africa, along the way encompassing the highlands of Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, and several less prominent origins.

These often remarkable coffees are characterised by a variety of striking floral and fruit notes, from the almost perfume-like floral and citrus character of Ethiopia wet-processed coffees through the intensely acidy and berry-toned Kenyas to the soft and voluptuously fruity Zambias. This family of coffees includes two of the world's oldest and most traditional origins: the Harrar coffees of north-eastern Ethiopia and the coffees of Yemen, just across the Red Sea from Ethiopia.

Both of these coffees are picked and put out to dry on rooftops, fruit and all, much as they were when coffee first came onto the world stage in the 17th century. Both display variations on a wild, complex, slightly fermented fruitiness that many coffee lovers find as seductive today as the first coffee drinkers of Europe did in the new coffee houses of Venice and Vienna.

Coffee was first developed as a commercial crop in Yemen, but the arabica tree originated across the Red Sea in western Ethiopia, on high plateaus where country people still harvest the wild berries. Today Ethiopia coffees are among the world's most varied and distinctive, and at least one, Yirgacheffe, ranks among the very finest.

All the coffees display the wine- and fruit-toned acidity characteristic of Africa and Arabia coffees, but Ethiopias play a rich range of variations on this theme. These variations are in part determined by processing method. Ethiopia coffees neatly divide into those processed by the dry method (the beans are dried inside the fruit) and those processed by sophisticated, large-scale wet method, in which the fruit is immediately removed from the beans in a series of complex operations before the beans are dried.

The first wet-processing mills were established in Ethiopia in 1972, and three decades later more and more coffees in the south and west of Ethiopia are being processed using a sophisticated version of the wet method. The immediate removal of fruit involved in wet-processing apparently softens the fruity, wine-like profile of dried-in-the-fruit coffees like Harrars and turns it gentle, round, delicately complex, and fragrant with floral innuendo.

Asia Pacific

The best-known and most distinctive Pacific coffee origins are grown in the Malay Archipelago, that chain of often enormous islands that make up the nations of Indonesia, Timor and Papua New Guinea. These coffees include the deep-toned traditionally processed coffees of Sumatra, Sulawesi and Timor, with their complex fruit, earth, and musty notes.

By contrast, wet-processed coffees of Sumatra, Java, and Papua New Guinea are bright and floral and may range from delicate to (in the case of some Papua New Guineas) intensely and fragrantly acidy.

Arabica coffees from India tend to be sweet, floral and low in acidity. India is also the source of the world's finest coffees of the robusta species, the wet-processed Parchment and Kaapi Royale robustas, and the exotic Monsooned Malabar, a dry-processed coffee that is exposed to moisture-laden monsoon winds for several weeks, which exotic process mutes acidity, deepens body, and adds a malty mustiness.

Hawaii coffee is another matter still. The celebrated coffees of Kona resemble the finest Central America coffees, with a classically clean, transparent cup that can range from powerfully acidy and bright to soft and delicate. The coffees of the island of Kauai are round, balanced, and low in acidity owing to low growing altitudes.

The island of Molokai produces two distinctive coffees, a wet-processed Malulani Estate remarkable for its spicy pipe- tobacco tones, and the dry-processed Molokai Muleskinner, a rather rough, unpredictable coffee that often displays mild musty and fruit ferment notes.

Sumatra is one of the great romance coffees of the world. It is not simply that the Indonesian island of Sumatra embodies a Conradian romance of the unfamiliar. When it is at its best the coffee itself suggests intrigue, with its complexity, its weight without heaviness, and an acidity that resonates deep inside the heart of the coffee, enveloped in richness, rather than confronting the palate the moment we lift the cup.

Some admirers of Sumatra enjoy certain of these flavour taints. Earthy Sumatras, which pick up the taste of fresh clay from having been dried directly on the earth, are popular among some coffee drinkers. Musty Sumatras, which acquire the rather hard, mildewy taste of old shoes in a damp closet, are also attractive to some palates.