Terroir Select Coffees - The Long Road To Quality Coffee

The Long Road To Quality Coffee

Coffee production overview

With this brief overview I begin the story of how quality coffee is produced, from seed to cup.

There are three key stages of production. The first is farming, which involves planting and nurturing coffee plants in a tropical environment that is punctuated yearly with a nine-month development of the coffee bean from flowering to the harvest. The second stage is the processing of the raw, green coffee seeds that we call “beans;” this involves removing the two seeds from the fruit, drying them to a stable moisture content, sorting them to assure quality consistency from cup to cup, and storing the coffee before shipping. The second stage ends when the coffee is shipped to the roaster. The third and last stage, roasting, involves long-term green bean storage, roasting, packaging, and brewing of the coffee beans into a beverage ready for consumption.

A fine coffee should be clean tasting, sweet (not sugary), and aromatic. Before reaching our cups, however, coffee goes through a long and perilous journey of transformation. There are many decision points through all three stages of production where quality can be irretrievably lost and often is. At the farm level, for instance, it can be forfeited in the choice of the seed, the decision as to where the coffee plants will grow, caring for the plant, or in the harvest. Processing and finishing involve many more quality decision points. The consumer may even purchase a masterpiece only to destroy it in the brewing, the final decision point!

The potential exists for the world to produce a lot of very fine coffee. Sadly, quality is usually sacrificed due to error or cost considerations. Chronic low coffee prices paid to farmers throughout most of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first have held back coffee’s full potential to delight consumers.

First Stage: Farming

There are four critical decisions that a coffee farmer must make to produce quality coffee. The first one is relatively permanent: The farmer chooses where he will grow the coffee plants (Location). More or less costly adjustments can later be made regarding what slopes to concentrate on, which areas are less productive, or finding an ecological balance for the overall health of the farm. The second quality decision is what species and cultivar of coffee to grow (Seed). Because of coffee’s low prices during most of the twentieth century, choices have often been made on the basis of productivity and disease resistance but not quality. Such decisions can be reversed, but at great cost in time and money.

The third quality decision is how, the cyclical and costly hard work of maintenance of all facilities and the complex care and nutrition, in tropical conditions, for each plant in its environment (Grow). It takes nine months to get from flowering to harvest, twice that for grapes. Damage to the ecosystem, whether due to lack of resources, poor craftsmanship, or natural causes can have a crippling impact. The final decision stage is the harvest, where much can and often does go wrong (Harvest). The cardinal rule is that coffee must be picked ripe, yet this is rarely the case. The small coffee fruits, called cherries, are often in varying degrees of ripeness side by side. Each ripe fruit must be hand picked. A cherry contains inside only two coffee seeds, which we call beans.

Farming - Where, the first quality decision

All coffee grows in the tropics within the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. Fine coffees grow at altitudes of about 3,000 feet to slightly over 6,000 feet. Some rare exceptions exist: Hawaiian Kona is so far north of the equator that coffee there cannot be grown higher than 2,000 feet; it is simply too cold. Imagine Garden of Eden conditions with year-round moderate average temperatures between 68 °F and 75 °F; this is where you will find happy coffee plants. Freezing will kill the coffee plant and temperatures over 90 °F will affect quality and even productivity negatively.

Weather: Moderate rainfall is ideal, distributed in just the right way: there should be a dry season immediately before, during, and after the harvest, followed by “blossom showers,” which soak the earth just enough to initiate simultaneous flowering of all the coffee plants. Then, during this brief interval of flowering, showers politely stay away so as not to interfere with the setting of the fruits. Once set, months of rains follow, conveniently arriving in the afternoon after a glorious morning and departing in time for a spectacular sunset! Certain places in some years can be like that; the Tarrazu area of Costa Rica flirts with this pattern. Such weather leads to evenly maturing fruit and makes the harvest far easier.

Of course, almost none of the coffee-growing areas meet this “perfection.” Typically, less than ideal rain distribution makes for uneven ripening and far greater expense to pick only ripe fruit. The great Kenya coffees grow in relatively arid conditions, whereas other famous growing areas such as Cobán, Guatemala, have heavy rains, even during the harvest. Indeed, apparent handicaps may often also be responsible for special overall environments conducive to creating unique flavor profiles once obstacles are understood and accommodated.

Cloud cover, position of the sun, temperature range, rainfall and its pattern of distribution, soil composition and structure, accessibility—all play a critical role in the production and cost of quality. Higher altitudes can produce longer growing seasons and more ideal temperatures, below 90 °F and above 45 °F year round, with high diurnal contrast, ideal for growing complex, floral, bright yet balanced coffees. But this occurs at great expense: steep mountain slopes mean high maintenance and labor costs due to poor accessibility and proneness to erosion.

Landscapes like the Cerrado of Brazil provide a different environment: here the land at 3,000 to 4,000 feet up can be very flat and is ideal for mass production, including mechanical harvesting. Lack of rainfall is not necessarily a problem (yet?) because water can be brought from rivers near the Amazon to the north. Extreme dryness allows farmers using controlled water applications to provoke an even flowering and therefore an even-ripening harvest. Such coffees, when grown with great care requiring full labor, do best as espresso, a brewing method that applies very high pressure to the coffee grounds and squeezes out every drop of acidity, thus establishing good balance between liveliness and the heavy body produced by such environments. Although these areas can produce high quality, nearly all of the production is dedicated to maximize productivity at minimal cost, particularly labor. Brazil produces 30% or more, depending on the year, of the world’s coffee. This mass production is slowly improving in quality, as technology becomes more efficient and precise, and now challenges the vast majority of coffee growers living on mountain slopes who compete on price in a coffee world that still has very little price and quality segmentation compared to wine and tea. If this does not change, such farmers will ultimately be crushed.

Altitude can have a powerful effect on a coffee’s flavor profile. At lower levels coffee plants are subject to greater heat, less ventilation, and less diurnal temperature contrast. Coffee beans and their surrounding fruit ripen more quickly and develop smooth, duller, sometimes earthier, flavor tones than coffees grown at higher elevations. Very high altitude environments are subject to greater, rainier cloud cover interspersed with very intense periods of sun and high diurnal temperature contrast within an ideal range of 50 °F to 85 °F.

There are eight classifications according to elevation in Guatemala, for example, starting at Good Washed at 2,300 feet, to the highest, Strictly Hard Bean (SHB), at over 5,250 feet. Beans growing at lower levels tend to be softer and less dense; in storage, they lose their flavor more quickly than harder higher grown coffees. As a general rule, traditionally, the higher the elevation, the better is the potential premium paid to the farmer. Higher grown coffees exhibit greater floral and bright fruit flavors, with greater liveliness, or acidity, a positive term. High altitude usually also means more difficult access and maintenance of roads and greater difficulty planting, maintaining, and harvesting plants as well as less yield per tree. The highest grown coffees are not necessarily always superior to those grown at moderately high altitudes. Latitude is also a factor, the most famous example being Kona, Hawaii, which is very far from the equator and where 2,000 feet elevation is the highest one can grow coffee, barely. Most Kona coffee grows far below this threshold. Many very fine and delicate Brazils are also far from the equator. Bill McAlpin of La Minita in Costa Rica chooses very carefully hand-selected beans from a moderate to high altitude to give his coffee extra smoothness. Other factors are in play as well; although the finest Ethiopian Yirgacheffes are grown in the vicinity of 6,000 feet and have extraordinary floral aromatics, they generally do not have the intense acidity of the great blackberry-laden, high altitude Kenyas , Ethiopia’s neighbor to the south. This may be due to climate and soil differences and/or the radically different varieties of Arabica coffee grown in these two countries.

Soil affects production and quality as well. Coffee trees grown for high production demand a large supply of nutrients. It is assumed that a soil’s makeup will contribute to a coffee’s unique flavor profile (I do not know of any studies). The best soils provide good but not excessive drainage (many coffee countries have long dry seasons!). That said, superb coffees have come from very diverse soils: volcanic, clay, and sandy.

With newer, far better packaging and storage now being developed for high-quality coffee (where Terroir Coffee has been leading the way— click here ), beans once too soft and delicate to withstand the travails of overseas shipments and long periods of storage are now becoming available in their full glory, at least at Terroir Coffee, for the discovery of the discriminating coffee aficionado.

Farming - What, the second quality decision

Two commercial species of coffee

The farmer decides next, or in tandem, what kind of coffee plant(s) she will grow. The first step regards species and the second variety—or cultivar. These choices have long-term consequences regarding production and quality.

The genus Coffea belongs to a family of flowering plants called Rubiaceae. Two other well-known plants in this family are the gardenia and the cinchona, whose bark contains quinine.

Many species of Coffea: There are over one hundred species of coffee, all in tropical Africa, covering an extensive range of ecological micro-niches, from arid to wet, from high altitude to low, with the caveat that there be no frost. As one travels in an arc from west central Africa on the Atlantic Coast, eastward up toward the highlands of Ethiopia, and then south all the way to Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, greater diversity as well as native species of coffee with progressively less caffeine are found. Several species in Madagascar, which was once connected to Africa, have no caffeine but are quite unpalatable. For many years now natural cross-breeding experiments have been conducted to create hybrids from such plants for reduced caffeine and for disease resistance. Opus 1 from Daterra Farm in Brazil, combining Arabica with a different species of coffee, is the first successful result that I know of. Its beans have a third less caffeine than pure Arabica coffee while retaining the sweetness of a fine Arabica.

The only two species of Coffea that have commercial importance are Canephora, popularly called Robusta, as we will do here, and Arabica. Robusta coffee made its entry into the world only in the late nineteenth century, when Arabica coffee’s lack of resistance to different diseases became a critical factor. Sri Lanka was a major producer of coffee until a fungus called Rust (Hemelia Vastatrix) appeared, making the cultivation of Arabica uneconomical. Today Sri Lanka grows tea, which everyone still calls by that country’s former name, Ceylon.

Robusta thrives in hot, humid, low altitude climates and, as its name implies, is broadly disease and pest resistant, unlike Arabica. Sometimes Arabica plants are grafted onto Robusta roots where wet-earth-loving nematodes can otherwise wreck havoc. Much less care is generally taken tending, harvesting, and processing Robusta coffee than Arabica. Robusta trees produce coffee fruits in globular clusters and their leaves are quite large and waxy.

Robusta’s world market share is growing and now represents about 40% of the world’s coffee production, up from 30% a decade ago. This is partially due to the growth of new, more price-conscious markets such as Russia, Eastern Europe, and China, but also to the lack of cash incentive to produce high-quality coffee.

Robusta has nearly twice the caffeine concentration of Arabica coffee. It also has more of the pigment brown and thus improves the look of “dishwater.” Robusta coffee tastes, at best, “neutral,” as we say in the industry. Usually it tastes like a liquefied brown paper bag or worse. In certain parts of Europe commercial roasters are now steaming Robusta beans before roasting to soften their unpleasant flavors. Robusta is blended into discount and instant coffees. A high ratio is mixed with cheap Arabicas in poorer parts of Europe, such as southern Italy. An interesting exception is France, whose former tropical colonies, Indochina and Western Africa, are ideal Robusta-growing countries; the latter is the birthplace of Robusta. Traditionally, the more Robusta used in a blend, the darker it is roasted to mask its harsh flavors with carbonized caramel. Robusta is a component in many espresso blends, where its high percentage of soluble solids adds body (besides lowering the price tag) and produces long-lasting crema (the fine emulsified foam on top of a properly made and served espresso), all at the cost of finesse. In the latter half of the twentieth century the espresso roasting company Illy Café set a new espresso quality standard by blending strictly Arabica coffees.

Arabica coffee requires the cooler temperatures of high tropical altitudes. Although Arabica can taste as foul as the worst Robusta when not properly handled, it is the necessary starting point for producing naturally sweet fine-quality coffee. Costs to produce quality Arabica coffee, as we shall see, are dramatically higher than for Robusta.

The spread of Arabica, foundation of quality coffee, in the world

Arabica is unique. Most coffee species are diploid, meaning that they have two sets of 11 chromosomes. Arabica is the only coffee tetraploid, having 44 chromosomes in each cell. Coffea arabica is the only tetraploid species (2n = 4x = 44) in the genus, while other species are diploid (2n = 2x = 22). Arabica is also self-pollinating, unlike Robusta, ideal for creating stable specialized cultivars. It is estimated that bee pollination accounts for an added 10% production. Arabica can still be found wild in its birthplace—the mountain forests of southwestern Ethiopia, 3,000 to 6,000 feet above sea level. There it grows about 15 to 20 feet high in the semi-shaded understory of the forest. The general consensus is that the diversity of the Arabica plants in Ethiopia is too great for one to speak of varieties there. It is only when cultivated outside of Ethiopia that stable varieties, or cultivars, selected over several generations, have developed.

Ethiopia : Wild Arabica coffee plants still grow in the mountains of southwestern Ethiopia bordering on Sudan and Kenya. The first coffee farming was done near the Ethiopian city of Harar, one of Islam’s most sacred cities, to the east, closer to the Red Sea. The finest coffees were reputed to come from here during coffee’s first years in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Coffee beans from most cultivated coffee plants grown in Ethiopia tend to be small, elongated, light bodied, and quite perfumed in aroma. Some believe this to be another variety of Arabica, which they call Ethiopica; most of the literature, however, indicates that there is too much genetic variation to establish specific varieties or cultivars here as yet. When coffee became more popular in the late fifteenth century within the Islamic world, cultivation was brought to the mountains of Yemen, just across the Red Sea and known as Arabia Felix, the breadbasket of the Arabian Peninsula.

Mocha: Yemen and Eastern Ethiopia maintained a monopoly on coffee cultivation and trade for the first hundred plus years of its commercial existence. Coffees were brought to the Yemeni port of Al Mukah, on the Red Sea and in our times silted over, to be shipped to the capitals of the Middle East and, a little later, to the capitals of Europe. The Europeans associated the name of this exotic beverage with its provenance, and gradually the name Al Mukah transformed into Mocha. Today coffee people associate Mocha with a particular flavor profile coming from Yemen and from the region of Harar in Eastern Ethiopia. The beans from Yemen are very small and there is considerable morphological variation in the plant population. Thus no specific varieties or cultivars from Yemen have been determined. Nevertheless, as we shall see, Yemen is the dispersion point from which the sole two established varieties of coffee, Typica and Bourbon, populated the world.

Typica: Sometime around 1600 the South Indian Muslim saint Baba Budan smuggled a few seeds from Yemen to Malabar on the west coast of India. The Dutch then imported seeds from Malabar to the island of Java, Indonesia, in 1699. These coffee plants, first adapted to western India and later to the Javanese environment, evolved into the Typica variety of Arabica, dramatically different looking than the Arabicas grown in Yemen. One single plant of this heirloom variety, Typica, was taken to a glass house in Amsterdam in 1706 and thence to a glass house in Paris in 1715. In 1723 Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu successfully transported and planted a single tree from Paris onto the Caribbean island of Martinique. Arabica Typica would be spread from this one plant to most of South and Central America and later back to Africa ( Malawi). Typica was smuggled from a separate small planting in Dutch Surinam to Brazil in 1727. Only one other Arabica variety would make it to the rest of the world before the mid-twentieth century: Bourbon. The vast majority of Arabica coffee produced in the world today has an extraordinarily narrow genetic base, while the genetic richness of Ethiopia’s wild forests is only starting to be tapped.

Bourbon: A few years after coffee made it to Java, the French succeeded in planting Arabica from Yemen on the island of Reunion, in those days called Ile de Bourbon, in the Indian Ocean off East Africa. Between 1715 and 1718 only two plants survived migrating to the island but, once established, multiplied. The second heirloom variety, Bourbon, was born. Over a hundred years later, in 1864, Bourbon was planted in Brazil, and in 1890 it was planted in Tanzania. While the Typica tree produces very little fruit and its beans are elongated, the Bourbon produces at least 30% more fruit and its beans are more compact and hemispherical (see photo of beans further below). An exemplary Typica will tend toward lighter, more floral flavor profiles, whereas Bourbon will have more powerful notes.

Variety and Cultivar: Bourbon and Typica are the two universally recognized varieties of Arabica coffee. Forty to fifty Arabica cultivars exist, produced by natural mutation or crosses from these two varieties and their cultivars. Only in the twentieth century would new blood from Africa be introduced into the very narrow genetic base of Arabica plants that had by then covered tropical Asia and the New World, grinding Ethiopia’s and Yemen’s production into commercial insignificance.

Development of Arabica cultivars and hybrids

The development of new coffee cultivars and, more recently, of hybrids, is expanding to meet a greater range of needs—from agricultural challenges to the diversification of markets and their niches. Let us briefly look at the evolution from the two original varieties of Arabica to the many cultivars today and how they were selected.

Spontaneous mutations have occurred many times since the spread of Typica and Bourbon around the world. Individual plants exhibiting desirable features were identified and propagated to become cultivars. A perfect example is the appearance in 1871 of a very different-looking coffee plant in a field of Typica trees. It had huge leaves, fruit and beans. Named after its birthplace, the county of Maragogipe in the Brazilian state of Bahia, the mutant Maragogipe was later cultivated as a niche coffee throughout Latin America. The large size of its beans once made it quite popular in Europe for decorating cookies.

Natural crossbreeding between cultivars and the two varieties (Bourbon and Typica) was the next step. For example, Maragogype was later crossed with the cultivar Pacas, itself a compact El Salvadoran mutant of Bourbon, to produce Pacamara, bearing very large beans of fine quality and unique flavor.

Selection criteria

Cultivars have typically been selected for yield, disease and pest resistance, drought, and growth habit. Quality in the cup has always been incidental, although this should be changing as the Specialty Coffee sector continues growing. Despite the neglect of quality in the selection criteria, some cultivars are notable for their extreme quality, as we shall see.

Yield per acre: Low world market prices for green coffee have dominated the entire spectrum of the coffee market for decades and have made productivity the dominant desired trait in coffee cultivars. The increasing urgency from our ballooning world population to grow more on smaller parcels of land has added to the pressure. Both these factors intuitively point to the most intense agricultural practices possible, which favor flat terrains and high-yielding coffee cultivars. Exploiting the new cultivars has permitted efficiency-oriented farmers to raise productivity three to ten times what it was a few decades ago. The density of coffee plants has increased dramatically, from about 400 plants per acre at the turn of the twentieth century to 1,200 on many farms today, even in mountainous areas. Some are now practicing “super-density,” with up to 6,000 plants per acre. Another strategy is mechanized agriculture where plants are grown in hedges and labor is kept to a minimum. In both cases the plants are grown in full or near-full sunlight, heavily fertilized and often irrigated. High production farms completely replace their trees every fifteen years, for they are, by then, exhausted. Most modern cultivars can achieve this high-yield criterion but do not have to: if grown on more organic, less industrial-type farms, the same high-yielding cultivars can produce steadily for many decades, and also supply distinctive, very fine quality coffees.

Growth habit: Compactness of size and vertical growth habits, the latter advantageous for coffee hedges that are mechanically harvested, are increasingly important criteria. High-yield, compact-growth cultivars, such as Caturra, are often seen on the mountainsides of Latin America. These shorter, dense trees, called dwarfs, can be planted much closer together, almost doubling the trees per area planted compared to older cultivars, so that their yield per acre is substantially greater, even though they may produce somewhat less per tree.

Disease and pest resistance have become equally important criteria since the 1970’s. Plagues have multiplied and spread across the oceans, occasioning major efforts to create resistant plants. These have almost always involved crossing Arabica with a different species of coffee tree, usually Robusta. Examples abound: the two most famous, or infamous for those of us preferring quality, are Catimor, whose progeny have spread from Latin America to the rest of the world, and Ruiru 11. This second plant was developed in Kenya to combat the dreaded Coffee Berry Disease (CBD), a highly virulent form of Anthracnose, which can wipe out as much as 85% of a farm’s crop in a bad year. Copper spraying, allowed even in organic farming, is applied as many as fourteen times a year in Kenya to control this pestilence. A cup of Catimor or Ruiru 11 can start out nicely enough, although without distinction, but the tail of the devil is in the aftertaste (harsh earthiness). Brazil has developed the Icatu line of hybrids, some of which show quality promise. Kenya is said to be coming out with new hybrids having far better quality. We hope it is so!

Drought resistance: one of the most revered cultivars in Specialty Coffee is Kenya’s SL-28 (named for Scott Laboratories and the particular line selection that was chosen; I prefer to think of SL-28 as something like a special Porsche for coffee drinkers), developed in the 1930s from Bourbon for the relatively dry conditions prevalent in Kenya’s great coffee-growing region. This grand cultivar has a huge, distinct flavor profile, but is, alas, extremely prone to CBD, so farmers have been encouraged for many years to switch to the resistant Ruiru 11. That thousands of tiny impoverished landholders growing multiple crops and situated in Kenya’s richest agricultural zone might switch to a coffee that has no worth unless produced in huge quantity requiring great efficiency and high use of fertilizers seemed to be of little concern to those in charge. It is to be hoped that future research, which is clearly urgent, is focused equally on quality as it is with quantity. Kenya is a potential Bordeaux of coffee.

The industry of coffee versus the quality of coffee: The Colombian Federation of Coffee Growers, which represents all Colombian growers, the vast majority of whom are small, has recently announced a plan to dramatically increase Colombia’s coffee production by introducing a new high-production, disease-resistant Arabica-Robusta hybrid coffee with, hopefully, improved quality over previous efforts. This would catapult Colombia to being, potentially, the undisputed number two volume seller of coffee in the world by 2015. Farmers are being encouraged to pull out their old plants in favor of this one, a considerable investment for people who have little to start with. My concern—and that of my associates in the specialty field—is that though Colombia may well increase production, small farmers and their environments will not necessarily be better off because of it, nor will the growing number of quality consumers be thrilled with the results. Colombia is a treasure house of potentially great coffees that has hardly been tapped. Stressing higher quality standards, properly valued, over productivity could reinvigorate the quality of life for many small as well as large farmers. We will revisit this issue when we focus on farming.

Typica and its mutant Cultivars:

Typica isthe oldest and one of the least productive Arabica plants. Growing up to 20 feet if unpruned, it is conical in shape and quite open in structure, with its branches almost horizontal to the main stem; its young leaves are bronze colored before turning green. Typica has adjusted to many different environments in the world and these adaptations have acquired names of their own even though they are still the Typica variety. The most famous Typica variant is called Blue Mountain. It has beengrown in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica since the eighteenth century. In the 1880’s it was already one of the most expensive coffees in the world and is still highly prized by some to this day. Blue Mountain has shown some resistance to certain coffee pests and was planted elsewhere, mainly western Kenya where it has been eclipsed in reputation for quality by the Bourbon derived SL-28 and SL-34 cultivars. Bergendal is the Typica grown on Sumatra, principally in the Lintong area and further south where the famous Sumatra Mandheling is grown. It has been losing out to more productive varieties and hybrids in the last few decades without there being any tests to see how quality might be affected. This Sumatra Typica was later planted in Brazil (1896) where it would play an important parental role, as we shall see. Hawaiian Kona is also a strain of Typica, producing large beautiful looking beans. Kona Typica was introduced to the island from Guatemala in 1892, replacing an earlier Typica line from Brazil.

Maragogipe (also spelled Maragogype) is a mutant cultivar of Typica, as we described earlier. It has very large leaves, fruit and spectacularly large beans. Many Specialty roasters find this coffee to be wanting in body and flavor; it is my experience so far. It also ages in storage very quickly.

Two other Typica mutant cultivars are San Bernardo (or Sao Bernardo in Brazil) and San Ramon. Both arose in Brazil and are dwarf plants. They are found in small pockets throughout Latin America. The compactness of dwarfs allows closer spacing of trees and easier picking of fruit during harvest. These coffees are rarely seen nowadays, passed over in preference for similar dwarfs, mainly Caturra, from the Bourbon variety. La Esperanza Farm, which won first place in the 2006 Colombia Cup of Excellence and which Terroir Coffee sells, has many San Bernardo coffee trees. Dwarf mutants from Typica originating in Central America are Pache and Villalobos.

Bourbon and its mutant cultivars:

Bourbon is at least 30% more productive than Typica, requires more fertilizer and its fruit ripens sooner. When it arrived in the new world Bourbon quickly overtook Typica in popularity with farmers. While being just as tall as Typica, Bourbon is bushier, less conical, and its young leaves are green tipped. Its cherries, as we call the coffee fruit, are more clustered. Despite this variety’s higher yield its cup profile tends to be heartier than Typica’s. While many producing countries have eliminated Bourbon and Typica in favor of more compact, productive and disease-resistant cultivars, important pockets still exist, notably in Antigua and Huehuetenango, Guatemala and in El Salvador. In both countries civil war in the 1980’s hindered the mass modernization which swept through other Latin American countries. Today many farmers preserve these plants as heirlooms with valuable flavor profiles highly attractive to the burgeoning specialty coffee market. The Bourbon variety has spread out into three different fruit-colored variations: Red Bourbon, Yellow Bourbon and even OrangeBourbon (see photo), this latter growing in El Salvador and shown here. The Yellow Bourbon has been very popular in Brazil, adapting the best to its environment, having higher yield and producing very sweet coffee. Some believe that the yellow Bourbon is actually a natural cross between a yellow fruiting Typica and the original Red Bourbon.

Caturra is a mutant cultivar of Bourbon that was discovered in 1935 in Brazil. It is a dwarf, and is highly productive. It was not found suitable for Brazil where it tended to overbear and then die back. Instead, Caturra found a home in the more mountainous countries of Colombia and Central America where it has been very popular. It can produce a lively cup with rounded finesse. Another dwarf mutated from Bourbon in Central America, is Pacas of El Salvador, which shares similar characteristics with Caturra but adapts better to drier conditions.

Crosses and hybrids

Catuai (Ka-too-ah-ee) was created in Brazil in 1949 from crossing Mundo Novo with Caturra. It is a semi-dwarf that is highly productive and capable of yielding very good quality coffee. The yellow Catuai is especially prized. Both Daterra Farm in Brazil and El Injerto in Huehuetenango, Guatemala, grow Yellow Catuai among other cultivars.

Mundo Novo is a cross developed in Brazil in the 1940’s of Bourbon with the Sumatra Typica. It has spread throughout the Americas but is most popular today in Brazil. It has very vigorous growth, is high yielding and can produce very good quality.

A third cross of considerable importance is Pacamara, which first appeared in the late 1950’s. The mutant dwarf cultivar Pacas was cross-bred with Maragogipe in El Salvador to produce a more compact, vigorous producer of large leaves, fruit and seeds. The Pacamara has attracted considerable attention of the specialty coffee world in the last few years, garnering first place in the El Salvador Cup of Excellence last year (La Montaña), and this year, in the Guatemala Cup of Excellence (El Injerto). It has a distinct citrus flavor profile.

The globalization and intensification of agriculture has led to the search for coffee hybrids which are pest resistant. Several of these have entered the coffee market since their introduction in the 1950’s. The S795 was a precursor; it was developed in the 1920’s in India by crossing the Liberica species (a poor tasting coffee species of no current commercial value) coffee with Arabica. It is still grown in Southern India with various Arabica cultivars and on the island of Sumatra where it grows alongside the Typica Bergendal. Its structure is that of an Arabica.

A very disease resistant natural Arabica x Robusta cross appeared in East Timor in the 1940’s and was called the Hibrido de Timor. It has spread throughout the island since the mid 1950’s. This hybrid was used to develop the Catimor hybrid in Brazil, a cross between the Hibrido and Caturra (Sarchimor was a similar cross), the latter cultivar being used to develop high yield and compact growth. This became popular in Costa Rica and other parts of Latin America but is now being steadily replaced with more traditional varieties or newer hybrids due to its poor cup quality.

Catimor was in turn used for creating the disease resistant hybrids Ruiru 11 in Kenya and the Variedad de Colombia (photo) in Colombia during the 1970’s. Both these hybrid Arabicas are very heavy fruit producers requiring many agricultural inputs and are universally suspect, quality-wise, in the specialty coffee world. Large growers have planted these new varieties in blocks, separating them from other cultivars, thus having control to respond to feedback from the marketplace and to observation of long-term environmental adaptation of these newcomers. Not so for many smallholders! They often replace plants one at a time as old ones die, resulting in a chaotic smorgasbord. Nevertheless, new hybrid generations involving much back-crossing with quality Arabica cultivars are being developed with quality given more weight in the search for resistance. The newest offspring from Variedad de Colombia is called Castillo. We shall see….

Finally, Brazil has come up with its own artificially created Robusta x Arabica hybrid, called Icatu (not genetically modified). One line of this plant is said to show particular quality promise.

New Varieties of Arabica

Now that a part of the specialty coffee world is focusing with real interest on fine single origin coffees, naming the variety of coffee has become quite important, as it is in wine. There is no doubt that the variety of coffee used is critical to the makeup of that coffee’s flavor profile. Most of the varieties, cultivars and hybrids presented here have only begun to emerge and more time will be required to properly grasp the range and potentials of many of them. We have just started to taste exemplary coffees! There is no greater proof that variety matters than the last Arabica we will present here: Gesha or Geisha. Here is a plant that was plucked out of the wilds of Ethiopia in the early twentieth century and which, after some meandering, found its way to Central America by the mid 1950’s as a coffee tree with promising resistance to certain blights. Its yield was very disappointing and soon Gesha became a neglected castaway. Then came the Panama coffee competition of 2004. Hacienda La Esmeralda, responding to the growing search for ever-finer coffees, presented a small lot of a unique, single varietal coffee from their farm. Their strictly Gesha variety coffee took the international jury by storm. Here were flavors the jurors never imagined existed in the Americas! Is this a variety, a cultivar? I have no idea. To read more about Gesha click here. It is being planted all over the Americas right now, the results of which we should be seeing in another three to four years. Will we see other exotic Arabicas step over the oceans? Care has to be taken not to export new blights carried in the seeds themselves along with the riches we enjoy as consumers.

Farming - How, the third quality decision

Overview of Coffee Growing

Coffee farmers around the tropical world share much the same problems as well as face challenges unique to their environment and to their market niche. Farmers competing on the mass market will have a completely different set of objectives than those catering to the socially conscious market, the ecological-minded market or the gourmet market which, in varying degrees, increasingly overlap.

Growing starts and ends with propagation. Besides purity of variety (and species), which we have reviewed, plant vigor is critical. It is not sufficient to just plant any seed. Coffee nurseriesare a constant concern for the ongoing health and renewal of all coffee farms. Coffee seedlings are usually transplanted at least once to their final growing place and great care has to be taken doing this.

Farming is a partnership with nature. Cycles and careful timing are part of a farm’s existential fabric. When to plant, when to prune or fertilize, when to weed etc. – these form the activities calendar by which farms live. No date on this calendar is fixed, just as nature never behaves the same way twice.

An increasing concern for many farmers is how the farm interacts with its overall environment. The use of shade trees is critical in many but not all environments for maximizing production, to say nothing about ecological concerns. What kinds of shade trees should be used, to what degree and how dense? Each shade tree requires its special maintenance as well.

Coffee trees often require regular pruning, both for long term structure and for starting over once they reach a certain size. To what degree - and how - is typically determined by the set of values, usually market-determined, and means a farmer has. Even the shade trees must be pruned – some seasonally. Also, what spacing between coffee plants should be adopted?

Management of weeds, plants in competition for limited nutrition and water, not necessarily native anymore, must be maintained. Herbicides are coming increasingly into question, particularly in mountainous regions where erosion control is an emergency. Pest management is also critical and in the tropics everything seems to be accelerated! Controlling myriad insects that use the coffee plant in ways harmful to the interests of the farmer, a host of different fungi, all evolving as farmers evolve in response, are the concern of farmers everywhere.

Then there is the nutrition of the plant. Agriculturally productive coffee trees take out a lot of nutrients and minerals from the soil. Each must be replenished in the proper measure. One part of a farm may have different imbalances than another. There is making sure that the soil has the proper pH balance as well.

Developing and maintaining infrastructure are essential farm activities. These assure efficiencies which empower a farm to produce quality consistently at the lowest cost. Infrastructure is also necessary to provide a robust link to the vital marketplace for a farm’s economic survival.

Finally, there is the roulette wheel of nature’s cycles and surprises, pure luck. We will cover each of these topics in a little more detail in the coming newsletters.

Propagation:.

Arabica plants are self-fertilizing and this allows for relatively stable varieties and cultivars that can simply be propagated by seed. An individual plant can be selected within a field of Arabica coffees for particular desired traits such as quality, hardiness and/or productivity. This single plant can, in turn, produce a new self-replicating cultivar within a few generations. Such is not the case for the cross-fertilizing Robusta species of coffee, on the other hand; plants have to be propagated in laboratory conditions from cell cultures to maintain pure lines. This is rarely done.

Farmers must be very careful when choosing seeds or seedlings for new growth. They should come only from those plants which fully exhibit or improve upon the desired traits of a particular cultivar or variety. The Catuai (ka-tu-ah-ee) cultivar’s special traits and quality is said to have been diluted in much of Central America due to imperfect selection.

Coffee nurseries require great preparation, attention to detail and care. The soil must be specially prepared and cleansed of all pests while an overhead structure protects the young plants from the sun. Germinating seeds are extremely sensitive to water: too much or too little can severely affect results. A traditional nursery will stay in one place for only about two years before it is moved to another virginal plot or is rested for the next year. It takes about one to two months for a plant to germinate. The healthiest are then often transplanted to polybags which contain unused specially prepared soils free of diseases and pests. Polybags allow for gentler transporting over larger distances for final planting. On the other hand these weigh far more than less protected bare-root seedlings which can be transported without heavy equipment. If a seedling’s final destination is to be highly exposed to the sun it should be weaned from the shade over a period of two to three months before being transplanted. Some more modern more expensive nurseries raise seedlings in special narrow cones which are raised a few feet above the ground and gently sprayed at precise intervals. High intensity farms replace their trees every 15 years. Smallholder farms can have trees that are many decades old.

Seedlings are sometimes grafted onto another coffee species’ rootstock: in Guatemala, for example, Arabica plants grown in wet soils are sometimes grafted onto Robusta rootstock to protect against nematodes.

The coffee trees are transplanted at the beginning of the rainy season into the field at about one year of age or older depending on the variety. Holes of between one to two feet in each dimension, depending on soil texture, are created about four weeks before transplanting to aerate the earth. Topsoil from a wider diameter is then used to fill the hole after transplant. During each transplant care must be taken that the plant’s taproot be straight, otherwise the tree will fail to be productive. Mulching during the first two years is extremely helpful, protecting the as yet undeveloped roots from excess heat and drying as well as from weeds.

The next section will cover layout and culture of coffee farms.

Foundations of a functioning farm

Access to labor is the first necessity for almost all but the smallest or most mechanized coffee farms; small farmers in Colombia will harvest rotationally from one farm to another and back again. As farms grow in size, reaching twenty acres or more, they gain improved efficiencies, but also become dependent on seasonal labor for the harvest, which can no longer be supplied by neighboring farmers. Social networks and labor pools that have worked for many decades have been crumbling in the early twenty-first century due to chronic below-cost prices for coffee, leading to entire valleys being depopulated of the crucial hands required to service the surrounding, and now dwindling, coffee farms. This has led to importing pickers, often inexperienced, from further distances and to lower standards in picking ripe coffees because of labor shortages. Coffee farmers and their employees have formed a substantial percentage of the mass immigration into the US coming through Mexico.

A farm’s economic and quality sustainability is dependent upon access to transportation. The larger the farm the more dependent it is on a good road system within it. All farms need access to key nodal points, such as processing centers, agricultural supply centers, banks, storage facilities and ports. Transportation is particularly critical during the harvest when coffee cherries must be rushed within hours to a depulping center (to be covered in the post-harvest section). Smaller farms are often isolated and very poorly connected to regional grids. Indeed, many producing countries, poor in resources, have not invested in infrastructure sufficiently to properly support their farmers. Connecting Worlds - The Coffee Trail is a beautiful, almost hallucinogenic, photographic chronicle shot in Peru which dramatically illustrates the immense hurdles facing many small coffee farmers today. This problem often extends well beyond the farms: some great quality producers, like Rwanda and Ethiopia, are landlocked, making transportation of high quality raw coffee to port more expensive and logistically problematic at best; other countries have primitive ports under increasing strain to provide timely shipping (more on this further on).

Maintenanceof infrastructure is a yearly struggle in coffee farm country, given that the vast majority of coffee farmers live on mountainsides; farm roads are made of dirt and quickly turn into mud traps every rainy season. Large trucks, heavily laden with ripe fruit or coffee in parchment, tear these roads apart during the harvest season, often in rainy weather. The farms themselves are in danger of landslides, destroying crops, roads and sometimes lives. Additionally, too many farms are losing all their topsoil from run-off regularly caused by heavy tropical downpours. It is all too common to see steep mountainsides planted with coffee without undergrowth, thanks to herbicides and, just as bad, without contouring.

Contour planting involves creating parallel ridges, often with ditches, at right angles to the slopes, a laborious effort. Even slopes of more than five degrees should be contoured. In most coffee-producing countries contouring is almost non-existent. Villa Flor, in the state of Nariño, Colombia is one of the rare farms I have seen with contour planting in Colombia. Costa Rica’s La Minita, pictured here, below right, is contour planted.

Origin of Arabica determines its requirements

The natural habitat of Arabica coffee is the understory of the southwestern Ethiopian highland forests, at four to six thousand feet above sea level, very close to the Equator. An Arabica coffee tree can grow up to twenty feet in height when not pruned.

Roots of the coffee tree

The root system loosely reflects the tree’s natural conical branch development above. There is a thick rapidly tapering tap root which descends no more than eighteen inches, from which a web of lateral feeder roots spread horizontally four to six feet out, and downwards as far as fourteen feet. It is not clear whether roots from old trees might penetrate still further. The feeder roots are most densely packed in the first two feet of soil, gradually diminishing the next two feet and becoming sparse after that. The roots, so concentrated near the surface, are therefore quite sensitive to ground temperatures and moisture. They grow deeper down during dry seasons. Continuously watered trees, on the other hand, will have roots that are 90% concentrated in the first two feet of soil.

Root protection

Ideal soil temperature should range from 80 degrees Fahrenheit in the day to 68 at night. Unprotected soil, however, can reach far higher temperatures than the surrounding air, rising from 50°F to 160°F in a day. High temperatures do serious harm to the coffee plant’s surface root system. Several factors can moderate the sun’s radiant effects. Ground cover is very helpful for this and for erosion control, but since most plants compete for water and nutrients, they can limit productivity, especially where distribution of rainfall is poor and/or where not enough fertilizer is available – often the case with small farmers who have fewer resources. Mulch is excellent for keeping soil temperatures stable as well as retaining moisture during dry spells and soil erosion for coffee trees. It is far more rarely used nowadays because of its high labor requirements. I have seen mulching applied consistently in Rwanda (photo above).

Self –Shading, die-back and shade trees

Closely spaced coffee trees shade their own roots but require far greater inputs on the farmer’s part, which, if done correctly, can lead to large increases in the production of coffee cherry per tree. Without the extra nutrients the plants will be highly stressed and produce small harvests of poor quality. The adjoining two photos show the same variety of coffee plants (Caturra) on the same farm having received no fertilizer for the year; the shaded trees are healthy and relatively productive while the ones in complete sun have few leaves, which are yellowed, and many fruits which are passing directly from unripe to over-ripe. The Arabica coffee tree will not release its fruit even when nutrition is drastically insufficient; this can result in die-back of many branches, as seen in the photo, as well as to the roots.

The use of shade:

The circumstances and goals of the farmer determine what use, if any, he makes of shade trees. Most of the many millions of coffee farmers in the world have tiny plots of land; they rarely have the resources to weather market downturns, particularly severe ones, and so can be heavily challenged to invest in fertilizer for their coffee plants, which may only “harvest” very low prices in the year to come. Many remain in debt even in good times, which have been all too few since the early 1990’s. As the saying goes, like small boats in the sea, they are easily capsized.

Shade trees, often supplemented with crop diversification, can help stabilize a small farm family from the oft destructive gyrations of the commodity coffee market, which, until very recently, was the only market available (it is still the only reality for the vast majority of coffee farmers). Well chosen shade trees provide soil nutrients, wood – for construction, paper, furniture – and even structural support for other crops, such as pepper vines, common on coffee farms in India. Determining type and distribution of shade is further complicated by the environment of the farm; temperatures, rainfall patterns, distribution of sun, orientation of the farm towards the sun – all these are factors for optimizing use and quantity of shade. Some areas are so cloud-covered throughout the year that shade would be of no possible benefit. On the other hand, a shade tree is used in Papua New Guinea to absorb excess moisture from the swampy soils there.
Coffee farmers have traditionally protected their coffee plants with shade trees, conforming to the Arabica coffee plant’s original habitat in the forests of Ethiopia. Shade offers protection in a number of ways: it protects against excess sun, which shuts down photosynthesis; shade helps moderate temperatures in zones where extremes can harm quality and production. Shade has been used in Parana, Brazil, in an extreme example, to protect against frost. The ideal range for coffee growing is above 60 F and below 86 F. Shade trees also diminish erosion due to rainfall, often torrential in the tropics; this is especially important on mountain slopes. They sometimes serve as windbreakers; farms on the slopes of mountains facing the Pacific Ocean in El Salvador are framed with grids of tall hedged trees.

Many kinds of trees are used to shade coffee plants, but some are far preferable to others. Banana trees can often be seen growing with coffee, providing farmers with food and shade, but they aggressively compete for water and certain nutrients, especially potash, critical for coffee fruit development. Shade trees should be evergreens with deep roots that do not compete with the coffee plants’ more superficial feeder root system. They should be vigorous, resistant to pests and easily pruned. Pruning should be done yearly just before the rainy season, to allow for ventilation and maximum sunlight to the coffee tree, reducing the danger of mold and fungus (the photo on right shows pruned shade trees at La Minita. Part of their forest reserve is in the background); this is labor intensive. Certain leguminous shade trees, such as Inga, popular in Latin America, and varieties from the Leucaena genus, fulfill these requirements and provide the added benefit of nitrogen, gathered from the atmosphere and necessary for growth and good crop yield, from their falling leaves and from nodes within their root systems (photo on left).

Shade is typically eliminated when the goal is high production; the coffee trees themselves, tightly spaced together, become self-shading with only a small proportion of the trees’ leaves actually exposed to full sun. This approach, frequently referred to as technified coffee, requires regular costly inputs of nutrients and constant monitoring of the soil’s depletions and changing imbalances. Weeds are a greater problem as well because of lack of shade. Sun-grown, tightly spaced, high production, often dwarf cultivar coffees became popular in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Many countries dramatically increased coffee production on less land, allowing more of it to be used for other crops. Efficiency-oriented farmers in Brazil, for example, have more than

quadrupled the number of trees per acre and increased coffee yield per acre more than five-fold since the 1960’s. The long term environmental sustainability of these intensive practices has been brought into question and is hotly debated these days.

Perhaps the most “practical,” broadest organization in the US for environmental and social sustainability in coffee is Rainforest Alliance. They are active in many coffee countries, offering certification that provides farmers with a gradual but specific, detailed transition program towards a more natural, shaded and protected environment. Farms without shade can get certified as long as they adhere to a strict plan of forest reintroduction and social programs. Terroir Coffee’s Daterra Farm, which has a huge reserve of protected wild habitat, in Brazil and El Descanso in Colombia are certified.

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