1. Ethiopia - 25 points Bags produced in 2013: 6.6 million With sweet fruit notes and delicate floral aromas, its hard to imagine a coffee that tastes better than a finely washed Yirgacheffe or a big, sweet, natural processed Sidama. This is the genetic birthplace of Coffea arabica, which has been growing wild and harvested here for millennia. Every time I drink a coffee from Ethiopia, I cant help but feel that this is how coffee is supposed to taste and everything else is an imitation, a copy of a copy, changed in some way inadvertently because of genetic drift or changing climates. Ethiopia also has the largest genetic diversity of coffee varieties, many of which still remain unclassified, which helps contribute to the uniqueness of the cup character. - Lorenzo Perkins, director of education at Cuvée Coffee Theres a reason great coffee comes out of Ethiopia year after year: its truly the birthplace of coffee. That means its producers rarely contend with problems that can overwhelm coffee growers in Central and South America (where coffee is not native, but rather introduced). The saddest and most recent example of this is the coffee-leaf rust that has plagued Central America this past year and wiped out thousands of farms. Because coffee is native to Ethiopia, it rarely incites climate or disease-born chaos. Coffee still grows wild all over Ethiopia , and there are thousands of undiscovered varietals in Ethiopia. Specialty coffees from Ethiopia are known for their syrupy body, which is a result of the dry processing method still popular with Ethiopian producers, in which the coffees cherry skin is left intact. This process also lends the coffee an exceptionally fruity and floral character. - Sarah Allen, editor of Barista Magazine
Posted on: Sat, 04 Oct 2014 00:59:49 +0000
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