coffee-for-less-blog
A World of Great Coffee, Region by Region
Coffee is currently being grown everywhere that it can be, the world over. It was originally discovered where it evolved, in Ethiopia in the 11th century. Initially, it was used for its medicinal properties, with the leaves of the coffee plant boiled in water and the rest discarded. From there, coffee first spread to Yemen and eventually to the capital of the Ottoman empire, Istanbul, where the beans were first plucked from the coffee cherries, roasted, ground and brewed with hot water, much like it is still done in modern Turkey and Greece.
From Turkey, coffee spread to Europe and the rest of the world, with entrepreneurial types quick to try cultivating the bean with the growing international popularity everywhere they went the world over. It turns that out coffee can only be cultivated at certain altitudes in a relatively narrow band that straddles the equator and circles the globe.
Coffee is now grown in more than 70 countries worldwide, and is the world’s second most traded commodity (after oil) and its second most consumed beverage (after water). These days, we get our coffee online, at the grocery store, or at our local independent or chain coffee shop and we don’t may not think too much about what goes into its cultivation, or where it’s grown and harvested.
Of course, that is, unless we’re comparing the flavor profile of single-origin coffee grown in one are to that of another. In this post, we’ll take a look at the major coffee growing regions the world over and what they produce.
Coffee From Africa
It should probably come as no great surprise that coffee is still cultivated in the East African nations of Ethiopia and Uganda. After all, as mentioned above, Ethiopia is largely considered to be the birthplace of coffee consumption by food. Currently, Ethiopia is fifth in the world in coffee production and Uganda is eighth.
Asia and Oceania Coffee Production
Asia produces a great deal of the world’s coffee as well, and is home to three of the top ten coffee-producing nations. Indonesia is fifth in the world in coffee production, which may surprise you if you don’t remember that both Sumatra and Java are islands that are a part of this nation that straddles the border between t he continents of Southeast Asia and Oceania.
It may also surprise you to find out that Vietnam is second in the world in coffee production, and that India is also on the list of the top ten coffee producing countries.
Coffee From the Americas
Lastly, the coffee producing countries of the Western Hemisphere are among the biggest producers in the world. Tiny Guatemala and Honduras are in the top ten at numbers ten and six, respectively. Mexico is the ninth biggest coffee producer on the globe, while Columbia (no surprise) is number three. Brazil rounds out the Western Hemisphere, and remains the top coffee producing country in the entire world.
Worldwide Coffee Roundup for 2019
Coffee is one of the world’s most popular beverages and is currently cultivated just about everywhere it can be, given the set of ideal circumstances that must come together for the crop to flourish. Chances are that if you’re drinking coffee that doesn’t come from a specific place, it is blended for flavor out of coffee produced in a variety of countries or even multiple regions. Coffee truly is an international beverage!