You don’t like bad coffee. We don’t either. And if you want to enjoy better coffee… add some trees. (Do you sense a theme here?) In Costa Rica, trees noticeably improve coffee quality, especially in areas with bad growing conditions. Read on below to find out exactly what that means.
What do you mean, ‘bad growing conditions’?
You can get coffee pretty much anywhere, but it definitely doesn’t grow anywhere. Especially not Arabica coffee, which is generally considered superior. It’s happiest with 100-150 cm of rain a year, between 15-24 C, and an altitude of around 1,300-1,500 m. So a lower altitude and more rain means conditions that aren’t really ideal.
Enter trees. In Costa Rica, in a place not well suited to Arabica, adding trees improves coffee berry weight and coffee bean size. Of course, it makes sense that better berries mean better beans, although there are always other factors.
Adding trees improves coffee berry weight and coffee bean size, appearance, and taste.
With tree shade, appearance also improves. Both green and roasted beans look better, and there are less deformed berries. And maybe most importantly – we are talking about coffee after all – it tastes better (thanks to body and acidity, if you’re curious). That’s because shade helps to delay ripening and moderates temperature extremes.
Better berries, better coffee
More good news: taste improvements are much more noticeable for an otherwise inferior strain of Arabica. Which is to say that with trees, the inferior strain improves enough to almost match the quality of the superior strain.
With some help from trees, high-quality coffee could grow in places that wouldn’t normally support it.
A note of caution: this doesn’t mean coffee farms should just go on a tree-planting spree, because with too much shade, yields can actually drop. So like all good things, it’s a delicate balance. With just enough shade, yields stay consistent, and quality improves. This means that high-quality coffee could be grown in more places, in areas that wouldn’t normally support it. And with coffee’s favoured growing conditions already under threat from climate change, we need all the help we can get.