I hear that things are so bad that in Venezuela which used to export coffe, the gov't is now importing it using oil to pay for it. Seems that people running out of coffee just pisses them off. Supposedly whatever coffee they're getting is the very bottom tier of what's produced. When you experiment, do you use a y of the coffee rating guides?
Since I started learning about various places that produce coffee, I've never heard anything about Venezuelan coffee. What rating guides are you talking about?
Most of what I've learned about different coffees has come from reading info on the
website where I buy green coffee, Sweet Maria's. SM's owner writes a LOT! He probably drinks a lot of coffee
, and he could use an editor. At first I found it all too much to understand. With time and experience tasting various coffees I bought, I began to understand what he meant. And I came to believe that most of what he says jives with what I've experienced myself. So I trust his opinions and his tastes.
There is a list,
https://www.sweetmarias.com/store/coffee-list.html?limit=all, of what is now available. It changes as new items are added. I read his taste descriptions closely before I order something.
I've read one book on coffee,
Home Coffee Roasting: Romance and Revival by Kenneth Davids. It had a section on different coffee growing regions.
Before I get into the different coffee producing regions of the world, I have to mention coffee bean processing. There are two very different ways of producing green coffee beans from the fruit of the coffee tree, known as
Wet and
Dry processing. Wet processing seems to be the most common. It best preserves the exotic and sometimes fruit-like flavors of good coffee. I know I strongly prefer it to Dry process, which to me, tastes earthy, as if someone put a spoon full of dirt in my coffee. Coffee from Indonesia (Java & Sumatra) are nearly all dry processed. Brazil and Ethiopia seem to do both. Most other regions of the world do wet processed.
South American countries, Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Bolivia produce some good coffee.
Brazil is the largest, and much,
but not all, of what it grows becomes the cheaper grades used in mass produced grocery store coffee. In the past,
Colombia became well known for it's better quality (than Brazil's) coffee. For the most part, it was the result of a government campaign to standardize and market Colombian coffee as a uniform product. Most of what it grew was graded and blended so it could be consistent on a large scale. Apparently, that level of organization is changing now. In the USA, there is a new emphasis on coffee from smaller individual plantations, roasted and sold by smaller local craft-roasters. Large industrial-scale coffee is falling out of fashion, in the same way that small craft-brewed beer has grown at the expense of large industrial beer brewing. As a result, some really excellent Colombian coffee is beginning to become available.
Central America has, in my opinion, the best coffee available, especially in
Guatemala (look for the Huehuetenango and Antigua regions).
Costa Rica comes next (especially the Tarrazu region). It also has followed the Colombian method of blending for consistent tasting product and mass marketing in the US. And like Colombia, this now seems to be changing.
Panama,
El Salvador, and southern
Mexico also, on occasion, produce some good coffee. The
Nicaraguan coffee I've tried was disappointing.
East Africa, has the excellent Ethiopian and Kenyan coffees. Coffee from
Ethiopia (said to be where coffee originated) has by far the widest and most complex varieties of different tasting coffee. I've learned not to generalize about Ethiopian.
Kenyan coffee (highly prized in the UK which often bids up the price) has some unique flavors often described as red wine-like, grape-like, or citrus-like. I love it, but have found that I like it better if I don't have it all the time. Other East African countries, Ruanda, Burundi, Uganda, and Tanzania, produce coffee considered as less expensive versions of Kenyan coffee. Some I've had are not bad. Zimbabwe (not Mozambique) used to produce excellent coffee, but it's government drove the remaining white plantation owners away, and exports of coffee from that country disappeared years ago.
Edit: I meant to say Zimbabwe not Mozambique.
Yemen apparently has produced good coffee, but recent events have made coffee from there unavailable.
South Asian coffee remains. That includes
Indonesia (Java & Sumatra),
India, Vietnam (vile tasting
robusta coffee), and some other Pacific islands like New Guinea. I have very little experience with them. Apparently, dry processed Indonesian coffee is best if it is roasted darker. It is often blended into dark roasts that have become a wide-spread fashion in this country. It's taste is described as earthy, leathery, tobacco-like or even pine-like. It ain't for me, but people who like Indonesian coffee seem to crave something called "body" in coffee. It's not a flavor, but a buttery smooth mouth-feel quality. The opposite of "body" would be "thin or watery". To my surprise, Indonesian coffee can be wonderful if blended with the more delicate Central Americans into something called Mocha-Java. These blends vary widely, but if done right, they mix the best of both types of coffee, high flavor and high body.
