We've been raised with a thought that coffee is a dark powder we find in a can, forgetting it's actually a fruit that grows on trees. With that in mind it's important to know where the coffee beans grow, different regions and climates means different beans and different taste.
There are well known regions that grow coffee like Latin America and Africa, and other less known regions like Taiwan and India. All coffee in the world grows in what has been termed the bean belt, the area between the tropics of Capricorn and Cancer.
There are two main types of coffee:
Coffea arabica: it's higher quality, and generally better tasting than Robusta. It makes up to 70% of coffee grown worldwide. Native to Ethiopia, this was the first coffee to be grown commercially. It's got pleasant acidity, and complex flavors.
Robusta (coffea canephora; formerly known as Coffea robusta): grown in Central and Western Africa, parts of Southeast Asia, including Indonesia and Vietnam, and in Brazil. The Robusta tree is heartier and more resistant to disease and parasites, which makes it easier and cheaper to cultivate.
Compared with Arabica, Robusta beans produce a coffee which has a distinctive taste and about 50-60% more caffeine.It's taste profile is generally lower acidity, and higher bitterness.
Coffee beans are the seeds inside the fruit of the coffee tree. The tree can grow tall
but usually it's trimmed down to 6-10 feet ( 1.8 to 3m ). the tree has oblong leaves,
they call its fruit the cherry, it has an outer skin that's dark red when ripe. Underneath the skin is the pulp, or muc ilage; a sticky substance surrounding the coffee bean and that is high in sugar. It tastes sweet if you bite on it. Each coffee cherry usually contains two beans, each with a flat side.
Coffee is different from other fruit trees in that the plant continues to produce flowers and newly ripe cherries all through the fruiting season. Therefore, the tree would have a mixture between ripe and unripe cherries, which would make the harvest a difficult task. After the harvest the green coffee beans get removed from the cherries, dried and prepared to transport.