Coffee is grown in the equatorial zone, the two main species are Arabica and Robusta.
The finest quality of Arabica coffee is produced in Brazil, Costa Rica and Guatemala, the most valuable of Robusta in India and in Central Africa.
Before the plant becomes productive must spend about 3 or 4 years, during which it is washed and trimmed frequently.
There are two ways to harvest: picking and stripping.
The first, fully manual, is to collect from the coffee tree only the ripe red fruit.
It 'a very expensive, but offers a very high quality product.
Stripping is a much faster method consists in rippingt from the branches, with special machines, whole clusters.
Once on the ground, the beans are collected and stored in baskets, at the risk of mixing immature with mature ones getting a little coffee not so homogeneous.
Once collected, there are two cases of coffee processing: dry or wet.
The dry method is that you get the coffee "natural" and consists in drying in the sun forseveral days of cherries.
The wet method ensures the coffee "washed", the fruit is shrunken put into fermentation tanks and then let it dry.
The coffee plant is an evergreen shrub belonging to the family of the Rubiaceae genusCoffea, with shiny dark green leaves, pointed and white flower
The fruits are green and the shape of cherry, turn red when fully ripe.
The natural habitat of coffee is the tropical zone, at an altitude ranging between 200 and 2000 meters: hot, humid climate and many rainfalls.
Many legends revolve around the birth of the coffee.
The most common says that a shepherd of Yemen noticed that if his camels and his sheep burn special red berries, remain energized throughout the day until late evening.
Kaldi, the shepherd, told his experience to some monks who gathered the berries, made them toast, and prepared a drink which allowed them to stay awake all night to pray.
It seems that coffee, already popular in Arabia at the begins of the seventeenth century.,was brought to the West by Venetian merchants in 1600 and from there began its widespread dissemination.
