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10 Coffee Beans Facts That May Surprise You

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Should you be a lover of all things coffee like me, you may know a thing or two about which coffee bean taste best, and you may even about roasting and grinding beans, but here are ten coffee beans facts, a number which you may have never heard before!

Colossal Coffee Beans - The largest coffee bean is the Nicaragua Maragogipe, a variety of the Arabica species.

Good Things Come to Those Who Wait - With just the right amount of shade, sun, rain, and the right environment, coffee plants will begin producing berries containing the "beans. "

Coffee Bean Not a Native of Costa Rica - The Spanish traveller, Navarro, introduced Cuban beans to Costa Rica in 1779.

Not Really "Beans" - Believe it or not, coffee beans are not really beans at all. They are not in the legume family, but rather they are that pits found inside of the coffee berries.

Making the Grade - Coffee beans are graded in various ways. Columbian beans are graded from highest to lowest as: "Supremo" "Excelso", "Extra" and "Pasilla". Kenyan legumes are graded with letter grades AA, AB, PB, C, E, TT, and T and the levels simply refer to the size, shape, and density of the bean. For the beans, size does matter since larger beans contain more of the oil that makes coffee so tasty. Costa Rican coffee beans are scored as Strictly Hard Bean, Good Hard Bean, Hard Bean, Medium Hard Bean, High Grown Ocean, Medium Grown Atlantic, and Low Grown Atlantic, from highest to lowest, respectively, and these qualities refer to the heights at which the beans were grown - Strictly Hard Bean, accounting for nearly forty percent of the Costa Rica coffee crop is the top grade grown above 3, 900 feet.


Hand-Picked : Even to this day, most coffee is still picked by hand, and a worker can pick from 100 to 200 lbs of coffee berries a day!


An Acre of Coffee - How much coffee would you guess to get using an acre of plants? One acre typically yields about 10, 000 pounds of coffee fresh fruits or cherries - which comes to around 2, 000 pounds of beans.


Imported Coffee - Even though Americans adore coffee, non-e is grown in the Continental U. S.; the only American places that generate it are Hawaii and Puerto Rico.


The Most Expensive Coffee - The most expensive coffee in the world is usually Kopi Luwak, selling for between $100 and $600 USD per pound (2009).


Also the Most Uncommon Coffee - The most expensive coffee is also quite possibly the most unusual in the world - since the berries go through the digestive system of the Kopi Luwak (a small cat-sized Indonesian animal), are then harvested from the animal's waste, and the beans removed, cleaned (hopefully! ), roasted, and sold.