Culture and Cup
The Effect of Origin on the Flavor of Coffee
By Kenneth Davids

All coffee processing is performed by hand in Yemen.

Can we really go traveling in a coffee cup? Do we really taste some essence of an entire culture in the sensory properties of a coffee? Do we taste samba in a Brazil and the sad gaiety of marimba bands in a Huehuetenango?
   Well, maybe. But it's a bit of a stretch, more useful for writing bag copy than for actually understanding coffee. On the other hand, we may tend to underestimate the role of culture in determining how a green coffee tastes. If there is no samba music pulsing in a cup of Brazil, there may be lots of other less sexy but just as interesting cultural energy behind how it tastes, and the same goes for the rest of the world's origins.
   One thing is certain: There is no natural essence of Costa Rica floating around in the air that changes the natural essence of Panama at the Costa Rica-Panama border. There are reasons why different coffees taste differently, and they can be roughly sorted out between nature and culture.
   Of course, nature and culture are concepts that overlap and bleed into one another in disconcerting ways. The great and distinctive-tasting heirloom variety of coffea arabica we call Bourbon is obviously natural: It's both a tree (pretty natural) and a spontaneous mutant, something coughed up by the serendipity of nature on the then-island of Bourbon. On the other hand, culture, not nature, selected it out of many other trees then growing on the island of Bourbon, decided it grew well and tasted good, and spread it throughout the world. So any reasonable discussion of culture has to take into account culture's constant overlapping dialogue with nature, and vice versa.

Approaches to Cultivation
Moving on, let's look at two of the world's most wildly different coffee origins in terms of the impact of culture on taste: Yemen and Brazil.
   Coffea arabica's botanical home is Ethiopia. But at some time before the 15th century, it was carried, perhaps as a medicinal plant, across the Red Sea to the high, rugged, semi-arid mountains of the southwestern Arabian Peninsula, in what is now central Yemen. There it was developed as a commercial crop for the first time, and the various manipulations required to transform it from the moist seed of a small red fruit to a hot brown beverage were either developed or popularized.
   Although Yemen once supplied the entire world with coffee through its famous port of Mocha (or Al Mukhâ), its production was never very large. And in the many years since, its output probably has shrunk. Along the way, however, it has remained stubbornly traditional in the way it produces its coffee. In fact, nothing much has changed except the mode of propulsion for the millstones used to hull the coffee: Rather than being turned by donkeys or camels, they now are powered by gasoline engines.
   Brazil, on the other hand, is not only the world's largest coffee producer, it also has become the most innovative. Brazil is the fountainhead of much of the technological innovation occurring in coffee today, and for better or worse, the world is seeing the first completely mechanized production of coffee in parts of Brazil.
   However, that doesn't mean Brazil does not have its small-scale, artisan coffee producers. It does, and many produce splendid coffees. Nor does it mean Yemeni coffee growers are not often enterprising and ingenious. I recall walking the terraces of the village at the heart of Bani Mattar, the region where Yemen's most famous and traditional coffee is grown, admiring the energy of the village shaik, who had managed to install the basics of a modern irrigation system on many of the terraces despite one of the world's most dauntingly rugged mountain terrains. But the basic dichotomy between these two growing regions remains clear and dramatic.
   Returning to the question of culture and cup, do we taste samba in a cup of Brazil and the arabesques of traditional mountain Arab music in a Yemen? That argument probably can be made in a metaphoric way. The soft, low-acid, delicately fruity cup of many fine Brazils might be thought to reflect the relaxed yet complexly rhythmic, melodic music of the samba. And the wildly fruity, often edge-of-fermented, richly acidy cup of the best Yemen certainly can be seen as exotic, and perhaps as austere yet as sweetly intense as traditional Yemeni music.
   But more to the point for those who are more concerned with understanding coffee than glamorizing it, what are culture's actual contributions to these two very different flavor tendencies?

Nature's Role
First, we need to acknowledge the clear if limited contributions of nature. We are only now beginning to understand the impact of soil on cup, so we need to leave that one alone for now. The impact of elevation is clear: Yemen is grown at very high altitudes, Brazil at somewhat lower altitudes (figure on an average difference of 2,000 feet), which translates directly into higher acidity for Yemens and lower for Brazils. Finally, rainfall patterns are a factor: In both Yemen and Brazil, the fruiting and harvest seasons tend to be dry and sunny, meaning there is a tendency toward sweetness (more sugars in the fruit) in both of these origins, together with an opportunity to dry-process coffee on patios owing to little-to-no mold-causing rain during harvest. Given their dry harvest seasons, it is no accident that both Yemen and Brazil are origins associated with dry-processed or natural coffees, meaning coffees are dried, usually in the sun, with all of the fruit still adhering to the bean. The Yemenis have the edge here, however: Coffee fruit dries in about three weeks in the intensely dry conditions of central Yemen, whereas the drying of whole fruit takes considerably longer in Brazil, perhaps accounting for the more frequent appearance of a mild mildew or musty taste in lesser-quality dry-processed Brazils.
   From here on, however, we enter the realm of culture in accounting for differences between the typical Yemeni and Brazil cups.

Trenches awating new plantings of coffee in Brazil’s Cerrado region.

Cultural Flavorings
The overarching difference to think about is the divergence between a mountain Arab culture that has successfully defied all outside control and much influence for centuries and a Brazilian culture that has from the beginning assembled itself from a constant inflow of outside influences, starting with the interaction of Portuguese and Amerindian cultures, to the heartbreaking but huge and culturally productive influence of West Africa, to the powerful flow of Italian, Japanese and other immigrant groups in the 19th and 20th centuries.
   Generalizations of this kind are always subject to contest and caveat, but it is safe to argue that Brazil is a profoundly assimilative culture, quick to adopt innovation, though also skilled at integrating it into a core of something we might call Brazilian, whereas the mountain Yemeni culture is one of the world's great examples of successful cultural resistance and stubborn continuity. At the time when I worked in Sana'a, the ancient capital of Yemen and the center of its coffee culture, every restaurant in town appeared to serve only Yemeni cuisine (except perhaps two or three housed in international hotels), and almost no Yemeni person I saw walking down the street wore anything except traditional Yemeni dress.
   The irony, of course, is that Yemen "invented" modern coffee owing to a kind of cultural assimilation, in this case of an Ethiopian tree and probably some technology and commercial structures from Ottoman Turkey. But since the pattern has been established, nothing much has changed.

In the Cup
In thinking about how this difference between continuity and assimilation works in terms of the typical cup, I would argue the following: The Yemen cup is very distinctive, meaning it is easily distinguished from the world's other coffee types, with the exception of the very similar Ethiopia dry-processed coffees. On the other hand, there do not appear to be a lot of differences in Yemen coffees based on region or type. Although Yemeni coffee traders and others who know the Yemen cup can make fine-tuned distinctions, for example between the famous Ismaili and Mattari types (the widely traded Sanani type is actually a blend from different growing regions), Yemen is an origin that tends to vary between a great Yemen cup and a so-so Yemen cup, rather than differing by type or region.
   The Brazil cup is less distinctive when compared to other coffees of the world (far less dramatic than Yemen), but at the same time more varied. In particular, there are the delicate, gently acidy, semi-dry or "pulped natural" coffees, with their temperate fruit and floral notes compared to the rounder, less acidy, dried-fruit-and-nut-toned "natural" types traded on the New York market.
   When looking for cultural reasons for these differences, first consider botanical variety, which is the product of collaboration between culture and nature. But culture has the upper hand because it is what determines which seeds from which trees get planted. Yemeni coffee varieties are almost entirely traditional, with virtually no dilution by modern hybrids or even by older globe-trotting varieties like Kent or Typica. Surely the absolute domination of these regionally specific, traditional varieties contributes both to the lush fruit character of the best Yemen, as well as to its relative homogeneity.
   In Brazil, however, varieties range from the noble and traditional Bourbon, strains of which produce many of the finest coffees of Brazil, to the lurking possibility of genetically engineered coffee varieties, to so many modern hybrids and selections. The coffee breeding program at Campinas has been one of the world's most productive, plus the vast number of trees grown in Brazil has predictably produced many spontaneous hybrids, including the famously huge-beaned Maragogipe and more widely planted varieties like Catuai.

Processing's Part
   The greatest impact of culture on green coffee character is the act of processing, or how the fruit is removed from the beans and how they are dried. Over the centuries, three to four basic sequences or methods of processing have been developed, and there have been an almost infinite number of variations on the main methods.
   And Brazil uses most of them. Brazil is the world's most cosmopolitan coffee processor, with some farms simultaneously using three processing methods: the traditional ferment-and-wash method (skin and pulp or fruit flesh are removed from the beans before they are dried), the semi-dry or pulped natural method (the skin is removed from the beans, but the fruit or pulp is allowed to dry on the beans) and the full-on dry or natural method (the beans are dried inside the entire fruit, including the skin). Each of these methods produce dramatically different results in terms of cup character, and variants on the main methods are many.
   In Yemen, coffee is always processed by the oldest and most traditional methods. The coffee fruit is picked, spread on rooftops to dry (on plastic sheets-one modern innovation), then it is held inside the shriveled fruit until it finds a buyer, at which time the fruit-covered beans are divided into large and small diameters, and both sizes are separately husked by millstone and cleaned by hand winnowing and sifting.
   The use of the natural or dry method, combined with quick drying in the thirsty mountain air, is one of the main reasons Yemen tastes the way it does: often mildly fermented but never musty (the fruit sugars may ferment but never mold or rot), at best richly complex with fruit notes that can range from blueberry to cherry to peach, to apricot or brandied chocolate, usually with a whiff of sweet fruit ferment that can stay on the cleaner upside of wine or lean down toward the wild and composty.

Socio-economic issues
Both Yemen and Brazil stand somewhat outside the Central American and African battlegrounds where the socioeconomic role of coffee is being contested. Nevertheless, they appear to be outsiders for different reasons, with different futures.
   Yemen has been virtually forgotten by commercial coffee interests and the specialty coffee world. For better or worse, it has been spared the attention of aid agencies that would use coffee as a development tool-no Fair Trade, no Coffee Corps volunteers, no chemicals in the fields but no organic certifications either-abandoned, really, an astounding cultural treasure gradually withering away, perhaps to disappear entirely.
   On the other hand, the huge new mechanized farms of Brazil and the smaller farms bobbing in their wake are nothing if not robust. If Yemen is about to fall off the map as a coffee origin, Brazil is looming over it like some incomprehensibly growing colossus. The best large Brazilian farms defy our easy generalizations connecting artisan production with distinction and quality. These mechanized farms produce, through sheer technical refinement, outstanding and increasingly distinctive coffee.
   If specialty coffee is going to save itself from the looming threat of homogeneity, with everyone in the world planting the same seed and using the same demucilaging machines to process a coffee that increasingly tastes the same, both Brazil, with its openness to change and experiment, and Yemen, with its stubborn refusal to change at all, offer different but valuable lessons for a coffee industry struggling to preserve product differentiation.