Knowledge Base
Coffee & Tea Guides
Brew better and explore more — buying guides, how-tos, and explainers for every coffee and tea ritual.
Explainer
Central African Republic Coffee: A Robusta Sector Interrupted
The Central African Republic was once a modest robusta exporter, and the trees still grow well on its southern forest margins. What broke the sector had nothing to do with the ground: three constraints — an extreme landlocked position, long stretches of instability, and disease in untended blocks — stacked on top of each other, and each one made the others worse.
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Senegal Coffee: A Coffee Culture Without a Coffee Crop
Senegal grows essentially no coffee, yet it is one of West Africa's most committed coffee-drinking countries. The reason is cafe Touba, a spiced infusion built from imported robusta and a forest-tree spice called djar, sold from carts and kiosks across the country.
Explainer
Cape Verde Coffee: A Wet Crop on Dry Atlantic Islands
Cabo Verde is a drought archipelago in the Atlantic Sahel, yet coffee has grown on Fogo for two centuries. How altitude, trade winds and volcanic cinder create a narrow exception, and why it stays a micro-origin.
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Benin Coffee: Why a Cotton Country Grows So Little Robusta
Benin has the rainfall a robusta tree needs in its humid south, yet grows very little coffee. The reason is institutional rather than climatic - and cashew is the second half of the answer.
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Equatorial Guinea Coffee: What Oil Did to the Farms
A Central African country split between the volcanic island of Bioko and the mainland region of Río Muni once ran a real colonial plantation sector. Then independence emptied the estates and offshore hydrocarbons outbid farming for every worker and every unit of capital. This is what it looks like when a coffee sector does not decline but simply stops.
Explainer
Comoros Coffee: How the Perfume Crops Took the Land
The Comoros have volcanic soil, tropical rain and highland ground, and still grow almost no coffee. The reason is not climate but land allocation: on very small islands, aromatic crops a household can process at home beat a tree crop that needs a mill, volume and a container before it repays anyone.
Explainer
Belize Coffee: The Gap in the Central American Coffee Map
Belize sits inside the most celebrated coffee region on earth and is almost absent from it. The reason is two structural facts: a low-lying country with one modest upland block, and a colonial economy built on cutting timber rather than planting slopes.
Explainer
Guyana Coffee: The Crop Sugar and Rice Pushed Aside
Guyana sits on the shoulder of South America and grows almost no coffee. The reason is not soil or skill but land: a thin drained plain that sugar cane and rice claimed first.
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World Coffee Research: Who Pays for Coffee Plant Science
The organisation behind much of the modern coffee variety information in circulation is funded by the people who buy the coffee — an unusual structure with real advantages and an obvious bias.
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Who Owns a Coffee Variety? Coffee Plant Breeders Rights Explained
The most famous variety names in coffee belong to nobody at all. What a plant breeder's right actually covers, why coffee sits almost entirely outside the system, and why a trademark, an origin name and a seed certificate are three different things again.
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Coffee Gene Banks: Why There Is No Seed Vault for Coffee
Wheat and rice are conserved as dried seed in a freezer, cheaply and almost indefinitely. Coffee cannot be. Its genetic heritage is kept alive instead as orchards of living trees that have to be weeded, pruned and replanted every year, forever — and that one botanical fact explains why coffee conservation is so fragile.
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Endangered Coffee Species: The Wild Coffees at Risk
A majority of wild Coffea species are assessed as facing extinction risk, but the coffee in your cup is not the one in danger. The loss falls on breeders, not drinkers, and it is permanent.
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Gabon Coffee: Forest, Oil and a Crop That Never Scaled
Gabon grows a little robusta in the north and the interior, and almost nothing else. The reason is labour scarcity and land-use maths, not a sector that collapsed.
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Suriname Coffee: The Doorway Into the Americas
Suriname grows almost no coffee now, yet it was among the first places in the Americas planted with it — a doorway whose handful of founding plants still shapes the continent's genetics.
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Sao Tome Coffee: The Island Origin Built on Inherited Estates
Two volcanic islands on the equator, more than one coffee species, and an origin whose terraces, shade trees and buildings all predate the people farming them today.
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St Helena Coffee: One Island, One Variety, No Scale
A remote South Atlantic island, a single eighteenth-century introduction of Yemeni seed, and a coffee population that never absorbed two centuries of variety development. What extreme isolation preserves, and what it forecloses.
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Paraguayan Coffee: The Origin Yerba Mate Kept Small
Paraguay does grow coffee, in the eastern departments along the Brazilian and Argentine borders, but it is one of the smallest and least documented origins in South America. The reason is not bad soil or bad farmers — it is that the same forest region belongs, culturally and commercially, to yerba mate.
Explainer
Liberian Coffee: The Country That Named a Species
Liberia gave its name to a coffee species the world now grows mostly in Southeast Asia, while its own farms shrank to a fraction of what they were. What Liberian coffee actually is today, and what rebuilding it would take.
Explainer
N39 Coffee Variety: The Kilimanjaro Station Selection
N39 is one of the old numbered arabica selections associated with Tanzania's Lyamungu station on Kilimanjaro. Here is what a station selection really is, why the record on N39 is thin, and why the country eventually had to stop selecting and start crossing.
Explainer
TR4 Coffee Variety: The Clone Behind a Robusta Replant
TR4 is a robusta clone from Vietnam's Central Highlands, propagated by cuttings and grafting rather than seed. Here is why clonal robusta is a fundamentally different kind of variety, what TR4 does in the field, and what the record actually documents.
Explainer
Arusha Coffee Variety: A Name, Not a Breeding Line
Arusha is a coffee name that points two ways at once: a Tanzanian region and a tall, old Typica-type tree grown mainly in Papua New Guinea. It appears in no major variety catalog, and the sources that describe its lineage flatly contradict each other.
Explainer
S274 Coffee Variety: The Robusta Selection That Has a Name
Almost all robusta is sold anonymously, by grade and screen rather than by variety. S274 is one of the rare exceptions — a named selection that became a whole origin’s benchmark planting, and whose lineage the public record still cannot settle.
Explainer
P88 Coffee Variety: Aceh’s Fixture With an Uncertain Pedigree
In Aceh the name P88 is everywhere — on nursery lists, in cooperative plantings, in conversation. What it formally denotes is another matter entirely.
Explainer
Pau Brasil Coffee Variety: Brazil's Compact Rust-Resistant Arabica
Pau-Brasil MG1 borrows the name of the tree that gave Brazil its name, but it is an ordinary and extremely practical working cultivar. What the record actually documents about it, and where that record runs out.