Like flowers in spring, berries in summer, and apples in fall, coffee trees are subject to the dictates of weather. Have you ever noticed that when fruit is on sale, it tastes the best and not just because you got a great deal? Following the laws of supply and demand, when there are lots of raspberries harvested locally or in the USA, they need to be sold, so the price goes down.
In the winter, however, raspberries grow on the other side of the equator and have many more miles to travel before they can get to your local grocery store, which means they end up costing a lot more this time of year. Freshness matters! Coffee is somewhat unique in its biological family Rubiaceae , for those keeping track. Rather than dispersing dry seeds, it self-pollinates and flowers, producing a coffee cherry. These cherries are just like a Bing or Rainier cherry; you can pick them off the tree and eat them, and like other fruits, there is a point at which they are properly ripe.
We can really go down the rabbit hole here and talk about sugar content and chemistry, but what we need to know for our purposes is that coffee cherries should be harvested, by hand, at their peak ripeness in order to get the best flavor into your cup of coffee. Once processed, the coffee starts to age and flavors begin to fall off, which means that a coffee roasted and brewed ten months after harvest is going to be less dynamic and flavorful than a coffee roasted and brewed three months after harvest.
The main exception is Brazil, where the relatively flat landscape and immense size of the coffee fields allow for machinery use. Coffee trees yield an average of 2 to 4 kilos of cherries and a good picker can harvest 45 to 90 kilos of coffee cherry per day; this will produce nine to 18 kilos of coffee beans.
Strip Picked — all the cherries are stripped off of the branch at one time, either by machine or by hand. Pickers check the trees every 8 to 10 days and individually pick only the fully ripe cherries. This method is labour intensive and more costly.
Selective picking is primarily used for the finer Arabica beans. This information is intended for Healthcare professional audiences. Kenya has its own unique grading system. The Ivory Coast is one of the world's largest producers of Robusta coffee, which is strongly aromatic with a light body and acidity. In the country where coffee was first commercially cultivated, coffee is still grown in the age-old, century-proven manner.
Within the small, terraced gardens of family farms, you can almost always find a few coffee trees. Since water is scarce in this arid land, coffee beans grown here tend to be smaller, and more irregular in size and shape.
Lack of water also means that the coffee cherries will be dry processed after harvest. The result is that Yemeni coffee has a distinctive taste that is deep, rich and like no other. In ancient times, when coffee was shipped from the famous Yemeni port of Mocha to destinations all over the world, the word Mocha became synonymous with Arabian coffee. The Dutch combined Arabian coffee with coffee grown on the island of Java to make the first coffee blend -- and one that is still well-known today -- Mocha Java.
Indonesia, one of the world's largest countries, is composed of thousands of islands. Several of the larger islands — Sumatra, Java, and Sulawesi — are known throughout the world for fine quality coffee.
The coffee plant was introduced to Indonesia by Dutch colonists in the 17th century, and the country soon led the world's production. Indonesian coffees are noted for a pronounced rich, full body and mild acidity. Indonesia is also known for its fine aged coffees, which were held over a period of time by farmers who wanted to sell them at higher prices. Warehousing gently ages the coffee in Indonesia's warm, damp climate and results in a coffee prized for even deeper body and less acidity.
Coffee originally came to Vietnam in the mid-nineteenth century when French missionaries brought Arabica trees from the island of Bourbon and planted them around Tonkin. More recently, coffee has been re-introduced and the coffee industry is growing so rapidly that Vietnam is rapidly becoming one of the world's largest producers.
Today, small plantations, located in the southern half of the country, produce mostly Robusta coffee. With light acidity and mild body with good balance, Vietnamese coffee is frequently used for blending.
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