How do Cancer and Capricorn affect your coffee?
The coffee beans that grow on coffee shrubs, or trees, look, feel and taste nothing like the shiny, aromatic and richly colored beans we buy at our local store or café.
 Coffee beans come from the coffee cherry, a berry with a soft skin enclosing pulpy fruit and seeds - which we know as beans. Each oval-shaped shaped cherry, which grows in clusters on a coffee tree, usually holds two beans.
Coffee trees need a warm climate to grow. For this reason, the world's major coffee-producing regions are located around the equator, between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Only the Tropics offer the ideal climate conditions: temperatures between 70ºF to 85º F (20ºC and 25ºC) with the proper combination of rainfall, humidity, sunshine and rich, fertile soil. The world's prime coffee - arabica - grows best at altitudes between 2,500 to 6,200 feet.
A coffee tree needs five years to mature and produce its first crop. On average, a mature tree will produce between one to two pounds of green coffee beans every year. It takes about 4,000 beans to make one pound of coffee and close to 100 beans to make one cup.
Arabica: King of Beans
 Around the world, two primary species of coffee beans are grown: arabica and robusta. Fine coffee is Coffea arabica, named after its original popularizers, Arab traders who brought the beans from East Africa to the Arabian peninsula, probably around 1000 A.D.
Arabica grows at higher altitudes than robusta. As a result, the beans mature in 60 to 120 days (rather than 30 to 60 days for robusta), producing coffee that has a more pronounced aroma, rounder flavors and better acidity.
Although arabica beans account for 70% of the world's coffee production, only the top 10% qualify for Van Houtte gourmet coffee. Robusta beans, or Coffea canephora, are easier to grow but far less flavorful than arabica. Robusta makes up the remaining 30% of the world's coffee production.
Coffee lovers who worry about caffeine will be interested to know that, among its many exalted qualities, arabica also contains about half the amount of caffeine than robusta. |
