Dominican Republic Coffee

Dominican Coffee is a wonderfully rich-flavored and dark roasted coffee.The pride and joy of the Dominicans. Most have their coffee black/negro in a small cup with lots of sugar/azucar. Try coffee with milk/cafe con leche. Coffee with lots of boiled milk/medio pollo. Or American Coffee/ Cafe Americana this is espresso coffee served with hot water to thin it out.

In the street you can buy it from vendors carrying little plastic, thimble sized cups with sugar already added. If you do not like sugar in your coffee then you will be shocked with your first taste. But try it, it does taste wonderful and will give you back the bounce back in your walk you lost while walking in the hot Caribbean sun.

Click here to enter the Cafe Bueno web site where they sell Cafe Santo Domingo delivered to your door.

COFFEE MAKING TIPS an article written by © Michael Spencer 2003

It is very hard not to get a good cup of Dominican Coffee. Here are some tips to help you make a good cup great. At the end, I will tell you how to get the Perfect Cup.

Two things are critical:

1. Fresh roasted and fresh ground coffee.

2. Hot brewing water.

Fresh roasted coffee:

The freshest and best beans come directly from the roaster. But excellent roasted beans produced by any of the Country's torre factories can be bought in any large and busy supermarket as they restock regularly. Beware of a bag of beans that has been sitting on a shelf in a colmado or at an airport gift stand for who knows how long.

If you buy enough beans for a week, keeping them in an airtight container on the counter will be adequate storage. Any longer, and you should keep the airtight container in the freezer.

Without question, the beans should be ground just before brewing. Ground beans stale very rapidly because of the increased surface area exposed to oxygen, which is deadly.

Bagged or vacuum canned ground beans are convenient, but many of the subtleness and nuances of taste and flavor are lost in the process. Plus, once open, here comes oxygen to attack what is left. The last pot will be nowhere near the quality of the first.

Hot Brewing Water:

Over the centuries experience and experiment has taught that the best liberation of aroma and extraction of flavor is accomplished if the water is just off-boiling as it reaches the ground beans. (92º-96º C).

That is why the "long espresso" brewer used by everyone in the Dominican Republic makes such good coffee. Boiling water is forced up the inner tube by pressurized steam. When the water hits the ground coffee, the temperature is perfect.

Conventional drip brewers (Mr. Coffee, etc.) are also adequate, as most newer ones will make the water hot enough. A washable gold or nylon mesh filter, while less convenient, will produce a much better brew because the paper filters capture some of the tasty molecules and flattens the coffee. In either case, you will want to adjust the amount of ground coffee you use to suit your taste. Be generous.

Finally, do not brew more coffee than you are going to drink right then and there. Brewed coffee left to cool or even left warming on a hot plate looses body and flavor very rapidly. You will just be wasting the quality you paid for and worked to achieve.

Now, here is how to get the Perfect Cup:

You will be riding on a dirt trail up in the hills, heading for home, when from a neighbor's house will issue the invitation, "desmontense."

As all the family chairs are being set up in the shade, you will observe that one of the children is crushing roasted beans in the pilon, and a pot of water has been set to boil over a wood fire in the clay fogon. The beans will have been roasted earlier over that same fire, and will be from what your neighbor reserved from his crop before it was sold.

When the water reaches a rolling boil, the pot will be removed from the fire and a generous amount of crushed coffee and raw brown sugar added, together with, perhaps, a dash of powdered clove, cinnamon, vanilla, or cacao.

After settling for a few minutes, the dark brew will be strained through cloth, and served to you in the family's best.

You will tilt back in the shade, sipping the brew, discussing the vagaries of the weather, the price of crops, and the nuisance of roaming pigs.

You will be drinking the Perfect Cup.

Dominican Republic Coffee

The coffee plant, belonging to the Rubiacede family, is a woody perennial evergreen with a main trunk with branches growing off of branches. The plant can grow tall but it is usually pruned down to make harvesting easier. It takes about 4 years for a plant to start producing. First comes the sweet scented flowers, then the little beans start growing, quite fast, where the flower once was. It will take about 35 weeks for the flower to turn into a green bean then red. When the coffee "cherry" is ripe it is bright red, firm and is shiny.

In my opinion, the BIALETTI coffee maker (pictured here) is one of the best for making your Dominican Coffee. With its patented octagonal shape it makes this maker easy to spot. They produce over 16,000 coffee makers per day. Since I've been making coffee with mine (bought for me by my son for a Mothers Day present when he was 7 years old, about 19 years ago. Recommended to him by his favorite lady in a little Italian coffee shop. He loved espresso coffee and really bought it for himself) drinking coffee made using any other method just doesn't taste the same.

If you've had Cafe Santo Domingo then you'll know why it is so highly recommended. If you haven't you can still buy it and have the coffee shipped to your home. Can't have your coffee in Zona Colonial, don't worry. Order some and as your drinking close our eyes, enjoy the wonderful aroma and vision the bright Caribbean sun while your under a fan in a little cafe enjoying the best coffee in all the world. Remember, you can have your coffee and drink it too!

We recommend this web site to buy your Dominican Coffee if you can't get to Dominican Republic. By the can already ground or buy the whole bean coffee and grind it fresh yourself. Whichever you chose, you'll love it.Your regular brand of coffee will never taste as good to you again.

Thank you in advance for supporting our hard working Dominican farmers

Dominican Republic coffees are usually a very rich and robust. They have a small amount of acidity. The coffee production is mainly in the Cibao, Bani, Ocoa, and Barahona regions. Even though the coffee from Dominican Republic ranks high in full flavored coffee the price is very reasonable.

Picture of unripe and ripe coffee cherries on the tree

Coffee in Dominican Republic is usually picked by hand. This way only the ripe beans are picked saving the unripe to be picked when they are ready. They are sorted to get the good beans out of the bunch. The good beans float in water the bad stuff sinks. Then they are separated again according to density of the bean, this is how the bean is graded. The better the coffee the denser the bean.

Then the beans are fermented. This may take a day or so, depending on the bean type. Then they are dried, first in the sun then in a drying machine until they have just the right moisture ratio. The drying can take anywhere from 6 to 14 days. About 12-20 kg of export ready coffee will be produced from every 100 kg of coffee cherries harvested.

There is much more to the coffee growing and production process which is too much for most to concern themselves with. Yet most people never realize where their prized morning cup of coffee comes from and how much it takes to get that aromatic black liquid into your hands. So when you do have that first aromatic wake-up cup of java in the morning just think how much was involved to give you that morning or after dinner pleasure.

Picture of the ripe cherry coffee beans