Purchase enough specialty coffee beans from a fancy brewhouse, and you're bound to notice some of the same regions listed over and over again on the little placard on the front of the bag.
Places like Guatemala, Costa Rica, Colombia, Brazil, Ethiopia, and Indonesia.
Each of these countries are in vastly different zones of the world, but they all share something in common: They lie in a band of tropical regions along the equator in what's become known as "The Bean Belt."
This coffee-rich channel of land doesn't line up like this by accident. Many of the world's most delicious coffee plants are cultivated in mountainous regions that lie at latitudes 25 degrees North and 30 degrees South of the equator.
And there's a scientific reason why coffee grown in this zone tastes much better than coffee cultivated elsewhere.
Coffee plants are very finicky about where they'll grow best. The tastiest beans come from plants that are not only cultivated in warm, humid tropical environments, but in terrain that sits at high elevations — ideally 1,300 to 1,400 meters above sea level, Sam Lewontin, a KRUPS ambassador, champion barista, and expert on all things coffee told Tech Insider.
The warm days and cold nights typical of this mountainous yet tropical environment "shock" the natural chemicals — organic acids, aromatic compounds, and sugars — that make coffee taste delicious into the bean. That delectable blend of flavors then gets released into your cup when you brew.
The magical combination of heat, humidity, rainfall, elevation, and soil quality affects the bean so precisely that one plant could have a radically different taste from another plant grown just a few feet away.
Places known for their tasty coffee, such as South and Central America, East Africa, the Pacific, and India, are notorious for having these perfect conditions. But as temperatures across the globe continue to spike, these gold-standard coffee-growing regions are becoming threatened.
One thing we're beginning to see is that the belt of fertile coffee ground is shifting to higher elevations.
"The range of altitude in places that have been considered to be strong coffee origins is narrowing," Lewontin said.
Warmer temperatures are also bringing ideal conditions for plant-killing diseases, such as leaf-killing disease called "roya," to thrive.
Coffee producers around the world are experimenting with different plant hybrids that can thrive in and combat some of these nasty effects of climate change.
Hopefully, Lewontin said, these efforts will be enough to salvage these tasty plants for decades to come.
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