If you’re a lover of all things coffee like me, you might know a thing or two about which coffee beans taste best, and even how to roast and grind beans, but here are ten facts about coffee beans, some of which I may have never heard of before!
- colossal coffee beans – The largest coffee bean is the Nicaragua Maragogipe, a variety of the Arabica species.
- Good things come to those who wait – With just the right amount of shade, sun, rain, and the right weather, coffee plants will begin to produce berries that contain the “beans.”
- Non-native coffee bean from Costa Rica – Spanish traveler Navarro introduced Cuban beans to Costa Rica in 1779.
- Not really “beans” – Believe it or not, coffee beans are not really beans. They do not belong to the vegetable family, but rather are the bones found inside the coffee berries.
- doing the degree – Coffee beans are classified in various ways. Columbian beans are classified from highest to lowest as: “Supreme”, “Excelso”, “Extra” and “Pasilla”. Kenya beans are classified with letter grades AA, AB, PB, C, E, TT and T and the grades simply refer to the size, shape and density of the bean. For beans, size does matter because larger beans contain more of the oil that makes coffee so flavorful. Costa Rican coffee beans are classified as Strictly Hard Bean, Good Hard Bean, Hard Bean, Medium Hard Bean, High Grown Atlantic, Medium Grown Atlantic, and Low Grown Atlantic, from highest to lowest, respectively, and these grades refer to the heights where the beans were grown: Accounting for nearly 40 percent of Costa Rica’s coffee crop, the Strictly Hard Bean is the top grade grown above 3,900 feet.
- hand picked – Even to this day, most coffee is still picked by hand, and one worker can pick 100 to 200 pounds of coffee beans a day!
- an acre of coffee – How much coffee do you think you would get from a hectare of plants? An acre typically produces about 10,000 pounds of coffee or cherry fruit, which is equivalent to about 2,000 pounds of beans.
- Imported Coffee – As much as Americans love coffee, none of it is grown in the continental US; the only American places that produce it are Hawaii and Puerto Rico.
- most expensive coffee – The most expensive coffee in the world is Kopi Luwak, selling between $100 and $600 USD per pound (2009).
- Also the Most Unusual Coffee – The most expensive coffee is also possibly the most unusual in the world – as the berries pass through the digestive tract of the Kopi Luwak (a small Indonesian animal the size of a cat), then are harvested from the animal’s waste, and then beans removed, cleaned (hopefully!), roasted and sold.
That’s right, believe it or not, it takes 3 to 5 years for a plant to produce coffee, and only if the conditions are perfect; coffee beans aren’t really beans at all; and the most expensive coffee comes from digested beans!