Coffees from Africa and Arabia

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 characterized 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.

Coffees from the Americas

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 flavor 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.

GEOGRAPHIC ORIGINS

An Intrduction Anyone who reads a newspaper is aware of how arbitrary the concept of nation state can be. National boundaries often divide people who are similar, and cram together those who are different. A Canadian from Vancouver has considerably more in common culturally with an American from across the border in Seattle than with a fellow Canadian from across the continent in Quebec, for example. The concept of country often plays a similarly arbitrary and misleading role in understanding coffee. Countries tend to be large, and coffee growing areas small. Ethiopian coffee that is gathered by hand from wild trees and processed by the dry method hardly resembles coffees from the same country that have been grown on larger farms and processed by the wet method. On the other hand, some families of taste-alikes transcend national boundaries. In the big picture, for example, high-quality coffees from Latin American countries generally resemble one another, as do coffees from East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. And both tend to differ from coffees from the Malay Archipelago: Indonesia, New Guinea, and Timor. But the notion of generally labeling coffee by country of origin is inevitable and well established. Hence the organization of the next section of this chapter by continent and country. It is well to keep in mind, however, that in tasting coffee, as in thinking about history, the notion of country is no more than a convenient starting point.