Where It Grows

Coffee Fundamentals

Course 1 · Chapter 2 · Where It Grows: Climate, Altitude and the Growing Year

What the Plant Wants

Chapter 1 followed coffee from fruit to cup. This chapter goes back to the plant. Wikipedia's Coffea arabica article gives the conditions in which arabica does best, and they explain why coffee comes from a limited set of places.

Condition	Arabica does best with	Note
Altitude	Usually cultivated at 1,200 to 1,500 m	Some plantations run from sea level up to 2,800 m
Temperature	Average of 15 to 24 °C	It tolerates low temperatures but not frost
Rainfall	1.2 to 1.8 m a year	Evenly distributed through the year

Chapter 1 noted that most cultivated species grow best at high elevations but cannot tolerate freezing temperatures. The tropics give year-round warmth, and altitude brings the average temperature down into arabica's range. The articles I read do not explain how altitude changes the flavour of the cup; that is commonly claimed, but I have not verified it (check).

Range, not a rule

The altitude figure is where arabica is usually grown, and the article also says some plantations go from sea level to 2,800 m. Treat 1,200 to 1,500 m as typical, not as a requirement. The articles I read give no altitude range for robusta (check).

Metres and Feet

Altitudes are quoted in both units, so it helps to convert quickly. The script below converts the figures above, and also does the harvest-timing arithmetic from the next section. I ran it to get the output shown.

# Altitude conversion and harvest timing
MONTHS = ["Jan","Feb","Mar","Apr","May","Jun","Jul","Aug","Sep","Oct","Nov","Dec"]

def m_to_ft(m):
    return m * 3.28084

for m in (1200, 1500, 2800):
    print(f"{m} m = {m_to_ft(m):,.0f} ft")

def harvest_month(flower_month, lag=8):
    return MONTHS[(MONTHS.index(flower_month) + lag) % 12]

for f in ("Feb", "Aug"):
    print(f"Flowering in {f} -> cherries ripe about {harvest_month(f)}")

print(f"Year of first useful crop if planted in 2026: {2026 + 5}")

# Output
1200 m = 3,937 ft
1500 m = 4,921 ft
2800 m = 9,186 ft
Flowering in Feb -> cherries ripe about Oct
Flowering in Aug -> cherries ripe about Apr
Year of first useful crop if planted in 2026: 2031

Rounded in the source

The article writes 3,900, 4,900 and 9,200 ft. The script gives 3,937, 4,921 and 9,186 ft, which round to the same figures at that precision. The flowering examples are only arithmetic on the "about eight months" rule, not real farm calendars.

The Growing Year

Coffee is slow. The Coffee production article says a plant usually begins flowering three to four years after planting, and the first useful harvest is possible around five years after planting. The Coffea arabica article says the plant takes about seven years to mature fully. Cherries ripen about eight months after flowering, changing from green to red, and should be harvested at that point.

Stage	Time
Planting to first flowers	3 to 4 years
Planting to first useful harvest	Around 5 years
Planting to full maturity (arabica)	About 7 years
Flowering to ripe cherry	About 8 months

Most producing countries have one major harvest a year. Colombia is the article's example of a country with two flowerings, so it has a main harvest from October to December and a secondary crop, called mitaca, from April to June.

Who Grows Which

The Coffee production article says about 70 countries grow coffee.

Species	Leading growers, in the article's order
Arabica	Brazil, then Colombia, Ethiopia and Honduras
Robusta	Vietnam, then Brazil, Indonesia, India and Uganda

Brazil, India, Indonesia, Uganda and Vietnam grow both species. Broadly, Latin America produces most of the world's arabica, Asia produces most of its robusta, and Africa grows both in roughly equal measure.

A Fragile Crop

Nearly all coffee cultivated over the past few centuries descends from a handful of wild plants from Yemen, according to the Coffea arabica article, and plantation coffee holds less than 1 percent of the diversity found in the wilds of Yemen alone. That narrow base helps explain why disease is a worry. The main disease the article cites is coffee leaf rust, caused by the fungus Hemileia vastatrix. It causes rapid loss of leaves, which hinders photosynthesis, and the article gives losses of up to 2 billion US dollars annually and a 16 percent production drop in Central America from 2012 to 2013.

Why this matters in the cup

Where a coffee grows, which species it is and when it was picked are the first things printed on a good bag. Later chapters on buying and tasting come back to these labels.

Not Yet Verified, and Sources

Sources. Wikipedia articles Coffea arabica and Coffee production, plus the Coffea and Coffee articles from chapter 1.
Truncated. The Coffee production article is about 115,000 characters and I read the first 100,000, so its later part was not read. It may contain the coffee belt, climate and shade-versus-sun material that I could not find in the portion read. The Coffea arabica article was read to about 100,000 of 107,000 characters; the unread tail was external links and reference material.
Not in the pages read. Altitude and flavour, altitude limits for robusta, and the latitude band of the growing regions (all marked check or left out).
Possible variation. Different parts of Wikipedia give different maturity times (about five years to first useful crop versus about seven to full maturity), which are different milestones rather than a conflict.
Not tested. The script is arithmetic only.

Exercises

Exercise 1

State the three growing conditions arabica does best with (altitude, temperature, rainfall) with their numbers. Then say why saying "arabica must be grown at 1,200 to 1,500 m" would be too strong.

→ Solution

Exercise 2

Change the script to convert 1,800 m to feet, and to find the harvest month for a plant that flowers in November, using the same eight-month lag. Run it and check the answers by hand.

→ Solution

Exercise 3

A farmer plants new coffee in March 2027. Using the article's timings, estimate the year of first flowers (give a range) and the year of the first useful harvest. Then explain why a farm might be slow to replace its plants when a disease arrives.

→ Solution

Quick Reference

Arabica: usually 1,200 to 1,500 m; 15 to 24 °C average; 1.2 to 1.8 m of rain; no frost
First flowers: 3 to 4 years after planting; first useful harvest about 5 years
Flower to ripe cherry: about 8 months
Growers: about 70 countries; arabica led by Brazil, robusta by Vietnam
Main disease: coffee leaf rust (Hemileia vastatrix)

Coming next

Coffee Fundamentals 3 looks at what happens to the cherry once it is picked: processing.