Arabica Coffee

Arabica coffee is best sited in partial or dappled shade with organically rich, well-drained, consistently moist soil, and it performs best at elevations of roughly 600 to 2000 metres where cooler temperatures and steady rainfall suit it; daytime temperatures around 70 to 80°F with cooler nights of 60 to 65°F are favoured, and leaf drop can occur below 55°F, so the plant is frost-tender and must be given warmth and shelter where grown outside the tropics.

Plantations commonly trim the shrub to about 6 feet to make hand-harvesting easier, and plants are fertilised during the active growing season to sustain growth and flowering.

Coffee leaf rust has historically been a major disease pressure on Arabica plantings, serious enough to have driven some growing regions to shift toward other coffee species. Arabica is also described as more delicate and more susceptible to pests than hardier coffee types, with scale, mealybug, thrips, caterpillars and mites recorded as recurring insect and mite problems on the plant.

The fruits, known as cherries, ripen gradually from green through yellow and light red to a final deep, glossy red, and because cherries on the same plant ripen at different times they are picked by hand to select only ripe fruit. After picking, the cherries are de-pulped to extract the two seeds inside each fruit, which are then either washed and fermented to remove the mucilage before drying, or dried whole in the sun with the pulp intact, before the dried beans are roasted and ground.

Culinary: Arabica coffee is grown principally for its seeds, which are dried, roasted and ground to produce a caffeinated beverage; the fruit pulp itself is edible but it is the seed that is processed into coffee. Arabica beans are also blended with the lower-value Robusta species to improve the quality and body of instant coffee.

Arabica coffee is native to the highland forests of southwestern Ethiopia and adjacent parts of South Sudan, with wild populations also documented in Yemen's mountainous regions; it was domesticated in Yemen by at least the 12th century. Seeds are recorded as having been carried from Ethiopia into Arabia by the 7th century, where the resulting drink became a widespread social beverage, and coffee cultivation later spread from Arabia into Egypt and across Europe following the Ottoman invasion of 1583. Because nearly all Arabica grown over the past two centuries descends from a small number of Ethiopian founder plants, the crop carries very limited genetic variation, a bottleneck that has made conservation of remaining wild populations important for the species' genetic diversity.