The aromas and the taste of coffee...which one should you choose?
Arabica vs Robusta

Are you a real coffee lover? Then you have to know it seriously.
Whatever coffee you drink, either espresso or American style, coffee has spread out all over the world. It is the second most spread beverage after water and its consume is increasing day after day. Personally, I am a real coffee lover and I enjoy tasting it and above all I love the feeling it gives to me.

We often find ourselves to buy this or that kind of mixture of coffee without even knowing what we are really taking at home or basing ourselves on limited knowledge or on false myths. So, I wondered to myself: do I really know about coffee? How is it made? What is coffee? What am I looking for when I drink it? Which are its characteristics? What are its particularities and its aromas?

I will try, in this article, to give an answer to these questions by analysing the two most important varieties of coffee: Arabica and Robusta.
Eventually you will learn to make the right choice for your palate. Here some information that will help you.

The main questions for a real coffee lover should be: which should I choose? Why? What am I looking for when I drink it? It is quite a personal matter though and it is quite simple: it depends on our taste.

Arabica and Robusta are simply two different types of coffee, whose differences are visible, starting from the beans (Arabica beans have an elliptical shape while Robusta beans have more a circular shape).

Let’ s discredit a legend which considers Arabica (also because more expansive than Robusta) better than Robusta. It is false. The taste and the quality depends on many factors such as the harvest, the transport and the roasting. However, it is mainly the genetic difference between the two types of coffee that makes the difference.

The Arabic coffee, more delicate, nowadays covers the 70% of the world production of coffee. But there are some very precious types of Robusta too (stronger and harsher) and the two kinds of plants give marked differences to coffee. We must be able to choose.

Arabic and Robusta plants grow in different geographic areas with different weather conditions too. Arabic plants need a higher altitude (600-2000 mt.), rain and a mineral ground. Robusta plant is stronger, it needs more humidity and it grows in lower altitudes.
That is why we find Arabic plants in the South and Central America, Kenya, Ethiopia and in the East Africa; Robusta plants are in the West Africa (Cameron and Ivory Coast ) and in the far East ( Indonesia and Vietnam).

The geographical and genetic differences obviously confer different peculiarities to coffee taste and blends, but we must choose the type that suits our palate better.

If we are looking for a stronger, harsher coffee with a foamy cream, we should chose Robusta , since the plant is more resistant and vigorous, with a percentage of caffeine which is double compared to the Arabic one (1,6/3% vs 0,9/1,7%).

The Arabic plant is in fact more delicate and its beans will give our coffee a more thin but intense brownie cream characterised by a delicate and intense blend ( more sugar less caffeine).

If we are aware of these characteristics, for example, we could have a good cup of arabica coffee even before going to bed, while with Robusta it would be difficult to sleep.

With this little, simple information about these two types of coffee available in commerce , we could improve and we could be more aware about our choice without wrongly judging a coffee. Maybe we are drinking a good coffee that doesn’ t suit our taste.

In conclusion of this little trip in the world of coffee, I can say that if we are really coffee lovers, in order to satisfy our taste, we should take into consideration the differences between the two types of plants and the factors we have just read above.

In this way we could enrich our knowledge of coffee and pay more attention when we choose the blend better for ourselves. Since a good coffee, for people who love it, can be a real moment of pleasure, it is necessary just a little bit of attention to enance this moment with the right blend.