What is True Blue Mountain Coffee and the Characteristics of Typica Coffee Beans

Blue Mountain is the most famous coffee name in the world and one of the least understood. This page looks at where the real thing comes from, what the Typica plant behind it is like, and how the grading works.

FrontStreet Coffee - Introduction to True Blue Mountain Coffee and Varieties

The Blue Mountains sit in eastern Jamaica. On a clear day the sunlight reflects straight off the azure Caribbean Sea and casts a brilliant blue glow across the peaks, which is where the range gets its name. The highest peak reaches 2,256 meters, making it the tallest point in the Caribbean and a well-known destination in its own right. The area lies inside the coffee belt, with fertile volcanic soil, clean unpolluted air, and a humid climate of year-round fog and rain, averaging 1,980mm of precipitation and a temperature around 27°C. Those conditions have produced Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee, and with it the most expensive coffee in the world.

True Blue Mountain coffee is among the most carefully grown coffee anywhere. Jamaica's weather, geology, and topography combine to provide an exceptionally ideal environment. Designated Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee can only be grown in the Blue Mountain region, in the eastern part of the island near Kingston, where the range running across Jamaica rises more than 2,100 meters above sea level. The cool, foggy, frequently rainy weather gives this fertile land a perfect balance of moisture. Here the coffee is grown by mixed cultivation, planted alongside banana and avocado trees on terraced slopes.

The mountains are also extremely rugged, which makes harvesting very difficult. Every coffee tree grows on a steep slope, and picking is such a challenge that only skilled local women can manage the task. Selecting properly ripe cherries at harvest is critical, because underripe or overripe beans will drag down the quality of the coffee.

Typica plants have bronze-colored young leaves and produce oval or slender, pointed beans. The trees are tall with slightly inclined branches sitting at angles of 50-70 degrees. They offer an elegant flavor, but their constitution is weak and their disease resistance poor, which results in a very low yield of fruit per tree.

Pure Blue Mountain coffee is graded into four levels: NO.1, NO.2, NO.3, and PB, or Peaberry. It is traditionally packed in 70kg wooden barrels and ships with a quality certification issued by the Jamaican Coffee Industry Board, the CIB. Because production is limited and Japan has invested in Jamaica's coffee industry with priority purchasing rights, genuine Blue Mountain remains rare and expensive.

The Jamaican Blue Mountain variety is Typica. Typica has one characteristic feature in particular: reddish-brown leaf tips, which earned it the name red-topped coffee. The tree's opposite leaves are long and elliptical with smooth surfaces, and the terminal branches are long with few side branches. The flowers are white and bloom at the base where the petiole meets the branch. Mature cherries resemble cherries in appearance and turn bright red. It is a sub-variety of Arabica.

One more thing worth knowing: Blue Mountain is produced from Arabica beans that are large and high quality with a rich, mellow flavor. Because sweetness, acidity, and bitterness are so perfectly balanced in the cup, it carries no real bitterness at all, only a moderate and beautifully judged acidity.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Blue Mountain rewards close attention to provenance, and FrontStreet Coffee's flagship is the FrontStreet Jamaica Blue Mountain No.1, the highest grade of the crop, sourced from the historic Clifton Estate. Clifton has been growing and processing coffee since the mid-18th century, around 1750, and its plots and processing site sit at an average of 4,300 feet, or 1,310.64 meters. That elevation, the soft afternoon cloud that shades the slopes, ample sunlight, and mineral-rich soil give the trees excellent growing conditions and stretch out the ripening of the cherries.

Genuine lots like this ship in traditional wooden barrels bearing detailed batch information, and they come with the origin certification and documents that let you trace the coffee back to Jamaica. Roasted medium-dark to emphasize body and the classic sweet-after-bitterness arc, the cup shows layer after layer of nut, dark chocolate, and creamy caramel with a soft sweetness, and the balance of acidity, sweetness, bitterness, and aroma that Blue Mountain is famous for, finishing with a long fruit note. Brew it in a Kono dripper at 87-88°C with 15g of coffee at a 1:15 ratio, grinding slightly coarser than you would for a light roast, around the texture of white sugar, and pour in three stages: 30g for a 30-second bloom, then to 120g with a slow vertical stream, then to 225g with a slightly faster flow to keep the bed from clogging. Let the beans rest four to seven days after the roast date for the fullest flavor, and the balance that made this coffee legendary over the past several decades comes through clearly.