Call me Mr. Natural If coffee drinking were a religion, Ethiopia would be the Holy Land. The coffee faithful would trek there, like the annual hadj of Mohammedans to Mecca. In the Sidamo province of southern Ethiopia, where the Great Rift system lifts the north-eastern African plateau above 5,000 ft., the species coffea originated. It […]
Way, Way Tasty As in other parts of the Americas, coffee was introduced to Guatemala by the Spanish, looking to profitably exploit the labor of their Mayan subjects. After independence in 1838, coffee cultivation was neglected until the 1870’s, when it was revived by German businessmen. Prior to WW II German nationals controlled over 60 […]
Cooperatively Organic In Northwestern Nicaragua, where the Coco river runs through the mountainous Segovia district, several hundred small coffee growers form a coffee growing cooperative known as the Prode Co-Op. Prode was organized during the reign of the Sandinista government, to bolster the living standard of Nicaragua’s farm families.
We come again to the familiar coffee-producing neighborhood of the Malay Archipelago, the once (Dutch) East Indies. The archipelago stretches some 3300 miles wide by 1500 miles, and embraces over 4000 islands. Among these are some of the most cherished names in coffee lore: Java, Sumatra, Celebes, and Papua New Guinea. This month we are […]
On the eastern half of New Guinea Island lies the unspoiled republic of Papua New Guinea; Former British colony and UN Trust administered by Australia. Although granted independence in 1974, the economy of PNG remains firmly in the hands of Anglo-Australians. We last featured them in June 1994, though PNG is a regular on the […]
“Smooth and Delicious” Legend Long ago and far away, coffee seedlings were taken by boat from their native Abysinian highlands (today’s Ethiopia), across the Red Sea and planted in the high arid mountains of the southern Arabian peninsula, in what is now Yemen. For centuries, Arab and then Ottoman traders enjoyed a monopoly on this […]