Tuesday 29 December 2009

Smell of coffee and vanilla in Guadeloupe...

coffee flower robusta

coffee plant

Guadeloupe has been producing coffee for almost 300 years now (since 1723). And it still does: grown on the slopes of the volcano, La Soufrière its pure origins and the system of locating coffee trees in the shade of banana trees have all made it the product of choice for connoisseurs. Today, coffee farming is gradually re-emerging. Now the crops cover 370 acres (150 ha), yielding around 30 tons per year. The 3 factors for great (arabica) coffee are: altitude above 600 m, volcanic soil and humidity.

On the first picture you may admire the flower of the coffee robusta plant. The second picture shows the coffee bean of the coffee arabica. We have visited "La Grivelière" in Vieux-Habitants, where plenty of the vegetation was shown and explained to us. Like the vanila lianes (picture below). As vanilla requires plenty of manual care during at least 10 months time, the final product is very expensive

Vanilla pods can be found in every supermarket and smell just lovely:-) Guadeloupe has right now nr. 14 in the vanilla production in the world with some 8tonnes a year...

On the last picture i am posing with a corossol tree, the fruit is still on my list: to be tasted:-)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That's very interesting but I didn't understand what is the smell of coffee -coffee or adifferent savour? :)
m