The World Atlas of Coffee: From beans to brewing - coffees explored, explained and enjoyed

by James Hoffmann

  Only three per cent of Yemen is suitable for agriculture owing to the scarcity of water. This terraced plantation in a traditional small fortress town is typical of Yemeni coffee farming methods.

  Having better levels of traceability doesn’t necessarily guarantee better quality. Often different coffees are blended together before export, and exported under the most valuable name. The high demand for Yemeni coffee is based on its unusual, wild and pungent flavours – and these come in part from defects in the process. If you want to try coffee from Yemen, it is advisable to source one from a supplier with whom you have already built some level of trust. Roasters will need to cup through many terrible samples to find a good one. Buying blindly as a consumer stacks the odds against you and you may end up with something that tastes dirty, rotten and unpleasant.

  TASTE PROFILE

  Wild, complex and pungent, a completely distinctive coffee experience, different from other coffees around the world. For some the wild, slightly fermented fruit quality is off-putting, while others prize it highly.

  GROWING REGIONS

  Population: 25,408,000

  Number of 60kg (132lb) bags in 2016: 125,000

  Please note that westernized spellings of place names in Yemen can vary quite dramatically. Each region described in Yemen is a governorate, rather than a geographically defined region. Yemen has 21 governorates, but only 12 grow coffee and even fewer are key producers.

  SANA’A

  Many of the premium coffees exported from Yemen bear the names of the varieties grown in this region. Confusingly, Mattari can be used to describe a region (around Bani Matar), and the name of the variety is probably derived this way. The region is based around the city of Sana’a, one of the oldest continuously populated cities on earth, and at 2,200m (7,200ft) above sea level, also one of the highest. As a region, this is the largest producer of coffee in the country.

  Altitude:

  1,500–2,200m (4,900–7,200ft)

  Harvest:

  October–December

  Varieties:

  Heirloom varieties such as Mattari, Ismaili, Harazi, Dawairi, Dawarani, Sanani, Haimi

  RAYMAH

  This small governorate was established in 2004. It produces a reasonable amount of the country’s coffee and has increasingly been the focus of water-management projects by non-government organizations to help increase coffee yields in the area.

  Harvest:

  October–December

  Altitude:

  average of 1,850m (6,050ft)

  Varieties:

  Heirloom varieties such as Raymi, Dwairi, Bura’ae, Kubari, Tufahi, Udaini

  MAHWEET

  Located south of Sana’a, the city of At-Tawila rose to prominence between the 15th and 18th centuries as a hub for coffee-growing in the region. The city was a collection centre for coffee before it headed to ports for export.

  Altitude:

  1,500–2,100m (4,900–6,900ft)

  Harvest:

  October–December

  Varieties:

  Heirloom varieties such as Mahwaiti, Tufahi, Udaini, Kholani

  SA’DAH

  This governorate has unfortunately been plagued by civil war since 2004. Confusingly sada is an Arabic term for black coffee, and is popular throughout the Middle East, often served with the addition of spices.

  Altitude:

  average of 1,800m (5,900ft)

  Harvest:

  October–December

  Varieties:

  Heirloom varieties such as Dawairi, Tufahi, Udaini, Kholani

  HAJJAH

  This is another small producing region, centred around the capital city of Hajjah.

  Altitude:

  1,600–1,800m (5,200–5,900ft)

  Harvest:

  October–December

  Varieties:

  Heirloom varieties such as Shani, Safi, Masrahi, Shami, Bazi, Mathani, Jua’ari

  BOLIVIA

  Bolivia has the potential to produce truly great coffees, and already does in very small quantities. The country’s entire production is smaller than that of one of Brazil’s larger coffee farms. Production is shrinking year on year, and coffee farms are disappearing at an alarming rate. We may soon see coffees from Bolivia (especially great ones) almost disappear.

  Frustratingly there is little information available about the introduction of coffee and the history of coffee growing in Bolivia. There are reports of substantial coffee production in the country going back to the 1880s, but not a great deal more. The country is large, about the same size as Ethiopia or Colombia. It is landlocked, which has traditionally posed something of a challenge to the export of coffee, adding both time and cost.

  Bolivia is relatively unpopulated, with just 10.5 million inhabitants. The population is often characterized as being incredibly poor, with around 25 per cent categorized as living in extreme poverty. The country’s economy is reliant on minerals and natural gas as well as agriculture, although coffee has never really featured prominently. It is impossible to ignore the impact on the economy, and on agriculture, of coca grown for the drug trade. Farmers are increasingly switching from coffee to coca, because coca provides greater security for producers because the price is subject to less variance. In 2010 and 2011, while coffee prices were high, anti-drugs programmes funded by Bolivia and the US managed to encourage more farmers to switch to coffee production. However, the price of coffee has fallen again and many farmers have turned once more to coca.

  The conditions for growing coffee in Bolivia are, in many ways, ideal. There is certainly the necessary altitude, and the climate has nicely defined wet and dry seasons. Most of the coffee grown here is old heirloom varieties, such as Typica and Caturra. Some excellent, clean and complex coffees have been coming out of Bolivia recently, although this wasn’t always the case. In the past, producers picked and pulped the coffees they grew and then transported the pulp to a central processing station. There were two big problems: firstly, changes in temperature on the journey to the processing station could result in the coffee freezing and, secondly, the pulp still contained enough moisture to keep fermenting. Often this resulted in a loss of quality or undesirable flavours creeping in. More and more, quality-conscious producers are doing the post-harvest work on their own farms. The US has funded the construction of a number of small coffee washing stations across the country as part of the anti-drugs programme. However, despite changes to help bolster quality, coffees from Bolivia still lack the reputation of those from neighbouring countries such as Colombia or Brazil.

  Competitions such as The Cup of Excellence have helped shine a light on the best coffees in Bolivia. I would recommend seeking out and enjoying them while they are still around. Even though speciality coffee does yield a greater return, even quality-conscious farmers are still giving up coffee production.

  TRACEABILITY

  Coffees in Bolivia are typically traceable down to a single farm or cooperative. Due to land reforms, large-scale land ownership has reduced since 1991, and the 23,000 families that produce coffee in Bolivia do so from small farms, typically 1.2–8 hectares (3–20 acres). The export of Bolivia’s output is handled by a small number, around thirty, of private exporting companies.

  TASTE PROFILE

  The best Bolivian coffees tend to be very sweet and very clean, but relatively rarely are they particularly fruity in flavour.

  GROWING REGIONS

  Population: 11,411,000

  Number of 60kg (132lb) bags in 2016: 81,000

  Coffee-growing regions in Bolivia have never been strongly defined and, as such, different roasters will use different naming conventions to describe which part of the country the coffee comes from.

  Bolivia is ideal for coffee crops, but its topography means export and production are difficult – the old route from La Paz to Coroico seen here is known as the world’s most dangerous road.

  YUNGAS

  Approximately 95 per cent of Bolivia’s coffee is p
roduced in this region, and in the past it held a reputation for quality in Europe, though less so recently. It can be defined as the region of forest stretching down the east side of the Andes, and in fact crosses from Peru through Bolivia into Argentina. The region produces some of the highest-altitude coffee in the world and this is also where coffee has been grown the longest in Bolivia. In his 1935 book, All About Coffee, Ukers refers to coffee from here as ‘Yunga’.

  Yungas is to the west of La Paz so many coffee buyers have to travel along the famous Yungas Road, nicknamed the ‘Road of Death’, to reach the coffee producers there. The road is often a single lane, winding and dug into the sides of the mountains without any barrier to prevent vehicles dropping up to 600m (2,000ft) into the valleys below.

  As the region is so large, many coffee roasters describe coffees as being from a more specific area, such as Caranavi, Inquisivi or Coroico, within the region.

  Altitude:

  800−2,300m (2,600–7,600ft)

  Harvest:

  July–November

  SANTA CRUZ

  This is the most easterly of the departments in Bolivia, and generally it lacks the altitude for high-quality coffees. There is some coffee production around the Ichilo province, although coffee is far less important as a crop compared to rice or timber. This region is hugely important to the country’s economy because most of the natural gas is found here.

  Altitude:

  410m (1340ft)

  Harvest:

  July–November

  BENI

  This is a large and sparsely populated department in the northeast of the country. Technically, part of Beni falls within the geographical region of Yungas, but a small amount of coffee is grown in the department outside the Yungas region. Primarily this is a cattle ranching area, although many crops are grown here, from rice and cacao to tropical fruits.

  Altitude:

  155m (500ft)

  Harvest:

  July–November

  BRAZIL

  Brazil has been the world’s largest producer of coffee for more than 150 years. Currently, Brazil grows around one-third of the world’s coffee, although in the past its market share was as high as eighty per cent. Coffee was introduced to Brazil from French Guiana in 1727, while Brazil was still under Portuguese rule.

  The first coffee in Brazil was planted by Francisco de Melo Palheta in the region of Para in the north of the country. According to myth, Palheta travelled to French Guiana on a diplomatic mission, seduced the wife of the governor there and was given the seeds hidden in a bouquet from her on his departure. The coffee he planted on his return home was probably used just for domestic consumption, and it remained a relatively unimportant crop until it began to work its way south, being passed from garden to garden as much as from farm to farm as a crop.

  COMMERCIAL PRODUCTION BEGINS

  The commercial production of coffee initially began around the Paraiba River, relatively close to Rio de Janeiro. This area suited coffee, not just because the land was ideal, but also because its proximity to Rio de Janeiro would facilitate export. In contrast to the smaller coffee farms that flourished in Central America, Brazil’s first commercial farms were large, slave-driven plantations. This industrialized approach is still relatively uncommon in the rest of the world, and fairly unique to Brazilian coffee production. The approach to production was aggressive: the most powerful, or forceful, would win disputes over poorly defined property boundaries and a single slave looked after four to seven thousand plants. When the soil became depleted from the intensive farming, the farm would just move on to fresh land.

  Coffee production boomed between 1820 and 1830, overtaking the demand of Brazilian coffee drinkers and beginning to feed the wider global market. Those who controlled coffee production became both incredibly wealthy and very powerful and were referred to as ‘coffee barons’. Their needs would have a significant impact on the government’s policies and its support of the coffee industry.

  By 1830 Brazil produced thirty per cent of the world’s coffee. This rose to forty per cent by 1840, although the massive increase in supply resulted in a drop in the global price for coffee. Up until the middle of the 19th century, Brazil’s coffee industry was reliant on slave labour. More than 1.5 million slaves had been brought to Brazil to work on the coffee plantations. When the British put a stop to Brazil’s slave trade with Africa in 1850, Brazil turned to migrant labour or its internal slave trade. There were great fears that the abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888 would endanger the coffee industry, but the harvest continued successfully that year and onwards.

  A SECOND BOOM

  A second coffee boom ran from the 1880s through to the 1930s, a period named after the two most important products of the time. The huge influence of both coffee barons from Sao Paolo, and dairy producers in Minas Gerais, led to a political climate known as the café com leite period. This period also saw the Brazilian government start the practice of valorization, a protectionist practice designed to stabilize the price of coffee. The government would buy coffee from producers at an inflated price when the market was low and hold it until the market was high. This meant stable prices for coffee barons, and prevented oversupply from lower coffee prices.

  By the 1920s Brazil was producing eighty per cent of the world’s coffee, and coffee financed a huge amount of infrastructure in the country. This unabated production lead to a massive surplus of coffee that would only exacerbate the damage of the crash during the Great Depression in the 1930s. Brazil’s government ended up burning around 78 million bags of stockpiled coffee in an effort to invigorate coffee prices, though it had little effect on them.

  During World War II there was growing concern in the US that, with the European markets shut off, declining coffee prices could drive Central and South American countries towards Nazi or communist sympathy. In an attempt to stabilize the price of coffee, an international agreement was drawn up, based on a quota system. This agreement drove up the price of coffee until it stabilized in the mid 1950s and is considered a precursor to the much wider International Coffee Agreement (ICA) signed in 1962, which would come to encompass 42 producing countries. Quotas were fixed according to the indicator coffee price, determined by the International Coffee Organization (ICO). If prices dropped then quotas were reduced, and if prices climbed then quotas were increased.

  This agreement lasted until 1989, when it broke down after Brazil refused to accept a reduction in its quota. Brazil believed that it was an extremely efficient producer, and could prosper outside of the agreement. The result of the breakdown of the ICA was an unregulated market, and prices dropped dramatically over the following five years, resulting in the coffee crisis that would inspire the Fair Trade movement within coffee production.

  ON AND OFF YEARS

  With Brazil being such a dominant supplier of the world’s coffee, anything that affected production in Brazil had a knock-on effect on global pricing. One such factor was the alternating cycle of Brazil’s annual crop. Over the years it became clear that Brazil’s harvest would swing each year between a large and a small harvest. Some work has been done in recent years to try to mitigate this effect, creating less variation year to year and greater stability. The reason for this variation in crop is that a coffee tree will naturally have an alternating cycle of large and small crops, but this can be controlled by light pruning. Light pruning has not been a common practice in Brazil, with producers preferring to prune back hard so there is little crop the following year.

  In the past there have been dramatic incidents such as the black frost of 1975, which reduced the following year’s crop by nearly 75 per cent. As a result of the frost, the global price of coffee almost doubled immediately. In 2000 and 2001 there were two off years in a row, that resulted in a massive harvest in 2002, with a huge production of coffee. This coincided with another long period of low prices for coffee, caused by an excess of coffee on the global market.

  MODERN COFFEE PRODU
CTION

  Brazil is undeniably the most advanced and industrialized coffee-producing country in the world. With a focus on yield and production, it has not retained a great reputation for producing coffees of the highest quality. Most large farms employ relatively crude picking techniques, such as strip picking, where the entire branch is stripped of its cherries in one go. If the plantations are large and flat (common in Brazil’s larger coffee farms), they use harvesting machines to shake the cherries loose from the branches. Neither method takes ripeness into consideration, and as a result there can be a large number of unripe cherries in the harvested coffee.

  For a long time Brazil also processed a great deal of its coffee by sun-drying the whole cherries on patios (see The Natural Process). The introduction of the Pulped Natural Process in the early 1990s did help to improve quality, but for years Brazil’s speciality coffee producers – who may pick by hand, who may wash their coffee, and who may grow interesting varieties at higher altitudes – have battled against the country’s reputation for producing coffees with low acidity and increased body best suited to espresso blends.

  However, while much of Brazil’s coffee grows below the altitudes best suited to quality, it is still possible to find some very interesting and delicious coffees there. Equally, the country produces some very clean and sweet coffees without much acidity that many people (quite rightly) find delicious and very approachable.