Differences Between African, Asia-Pacific, and Latin American Coffee: How to Drink Latin American Coffee

The Legend of Coffee's Discovery

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Around the 6th century AD, an Arab goatherd named Kaldi secretly observed his goats while grazing and discovered that after eating red fruits from a wild shrub on the mountainside, they became unusually excited. Curious, Kaldi personally picked these fruits and found himself full of energy and in a very pleasant mood. He then took these fruits to a nearby monastery, telling the monks about their magical effects. However, the monks believed this was the work of the devil and threw the red fruits into the fire. The fruits immediately emitted a special, mouth-watering aroma. While the head monk was asleep, one of the young, rebellious monks collected these cooled beans, ground them into powder, and poured them into a container filled with hot water - thus, the world's first cup of coffee was born.

Latin America: Premier Coffee Growing Region

Latin America, where coffee trees began to be cultivated in the 18th century, is nourished by the Amazon River - the world's largest river by flow volume, with the most tributaries and the greatest length. This has nurtured a rich ecological landscape in the rainforest. With advantages including abundant sunshine, high mountains, fertile, rainy, moist soil, and diverse natural microenvironments, it has now become the world's most important coffee-producing region.

Latin American coffees are predominantly processed using the washed fermentation method. This rigorous processing ensures that the produced coffee beans have superior quality, low defect rates, and are large and complete.

Coffees from this region generally have pleasant aromas and very balanced flavor profiles. They typically possess special cocoa-like flavors while maintaining a refreshing, lively acidity, making for a very delightful single-origin coffee experience.

Characteristics of Latin American Coffee

Central and South America are considered the finest coffee-producing regions. Their coffees are known for being mild, bright, and with elegant fruit acidity. Almost all coffee blend recipes include Latin American coffee beans. Countries in this region include Jamaica, Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama, and more...

Latin American beans (such as those from Colombia and Guatemala) are characterized by their refreshing, smooth taste, making them very suitable for blending with more distinctively flavored African or Asian beans to create various coffee blends. As for Asian/Pacific region beans (like Sumatra), they have an herbal flavor both in taste and aroma, are less acidic, have a richer mouthfeel, and are suitable as single-origin coffee.

Meanwhile, beans from the Africa/Arabia region (like Kenya) have a grapefruit-like acidity and aroma, with a richer mouthfeel, making them basically very suitable for iced coffee. For example, Starbucks selects more resilient, pressure-resistant Arabica beans grown at high altitudes that produce more aroma when brewed for their drip coffee; as for Robusta beans, they are more commonly used in instant 3-in-1 coffee products.

Major Coffee Origins in Latin America

Brazil's Santos coffee is quite famous; Jamaica's most renowned is Blue Mountain coffee, known as the "pinnacle of coffee"; Latin American countries including Mexico, Panama, Peru, Colombia, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua also all produce coffee.

If African coffee has good berry flavors and Asian coffee has distinct herbal plant flavors, then Latin American coffee belongs to the more balanced and varied category.

Brewing Recommendations

FrontStreet Coffee suggests brewing parameters:

V60/88-90°C/1:15 ratio/Time: two minutes

Important Notice :

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