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The Blue Mountains in Jamaica rise almost as steeply as stage curtain behind the city of Kingston. In just a short drive the uncomfortable humdrum and hustle of the capital evaporates, becoming just a tiny, distant roar. The Blue Mountains are a side of Jamaica that so few people see: they are one of the most relaxing and charming places in the Caribbean.

They are immensely fertile, their camelback ridges cultivated up to the 4000 feet reaches of the rainforest (with some surprising and decidedly subtropical crops, like lettuce and strawberries, that can grow in the cool of the altitude), but most importantly the Blue Mountains are home to a coffee that is renowned by connoisseurs.

My walking companion was Willie, a tall and dark man of about 50, whose brown, felt-like dreadlocks were collected in a bunch at the back of his neck. He presented himself as an organic farmer. As we walked, the conversation ranged over ground provisions and market life, and then as we passed through steep fields of bushes with shiny, crinkled, dark green leaves, it turned to coffee. He spoke in an unfeasibly low voice, with the lyrical and laconic speech so typical of the Jamaicans:

‘Well, you know, many people dem say dat Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee de best coffee in de world.’

It might have been just more Jamaican bluster (they’re not known for their modesty, to be sure), except that it is not only Willie and the rest of Jamaica that assures you so. At Whittards of Chelsea in London, Coffee Buyer Giles Hilton agrees that Jamaican Blue Mountain rates among the world’s finest:

‘There is a magic about Jamaican Blue Mountain which inspires awe among customers. The growing conditions are perfect and the drink itself has an exceptionally smooth and slightly sweet taste, which can be recognized at once’.

Certainly Blue Mountain is the most expensive coffee in the world. It retails at £26 per pound, four or five times the amount of most other pure arabica coffees. Drinking it is a prestige thing, a bit like driving a Rolls. Blue Mountain has its devotees and the demand is definitely there.

To begin with there is a scarcity value: the geographical area of the Blue Mountains is limited and carefully defined. More importantly, though, the Japanese take over 80 percent of the total product (they also have large investments in the industry). In Tokyo, people are prepared to pay silly amounts of money for Blue Mountain coffee - a simple cup will set you back about US$10 and there are stories of people paying vast sums to sit and drink the coffee from gold-plated cups in front of a van Gogh. The rest of the world fights over the remaining 10 or 15 percent, but for some there is a distinct cachet in drinking Blue Mountain, and they are prepared to pay for it.

Blue Mountain coffee must be grown at an altitude 2000 feet and above. The volcanic soil-type and the temperature are ideal, the climate is washed by regular rainfall and onshore breezes, but some say that it is the immediate altitude, literally the steepness, of the mountains (and therefore the quality of sun and shade) that creates the perfect geographical conditions for growing the beans.

The industry has grown in leaps and bounds. Hurricane Gilbert in 1988 was immensely destructive - 60 per cent of the heavy-bearing plants were killed and others faded after a couple of years because their roots had been damaged - but there has been a huge increase in cultivation as farmers switch from more traditional crops to growing coffee.

Willie had the view from the ground. ‘You know, dese people plaantin’ coffee by tousan’ ‘pon tousan’ of acre,’ he said, ‘an’ tree quarter of de politician in Jamaica plaantin too so’. When we took a break in a rum shop, the talk was all about coffee and how it is turning an excellent profit.

A man walked by with a curious double kilter; his arms swung back and forth as he pushed his heavy barrow uphill, but he was also compensating awkwardly for a sack on his head. At the junction he handed over his haul of red and green beans, which were measured off in a wooden box of an eighth of a bushel and then poured into a wicker basket.

Willie explained: ‘Next dem tek de cherry-berry down to de factory at Mavis Bank’.

The Mavis Bank coffee factory sits in a cleft between impossibly steep slopes, its red-tin roofed buildings set among ‘barbecues’, flat concrete stretches where the coffee beans are dried in the sun. I met the owner, white Jamaican Keeble Munn, 75 years old and sharp and sprightly, whose family has been in the coffee business since before he was born. He has worked in Jamaican agriculture most of his life (including a stint as Agriculture Minister), and now he calls himself a relic of the hills. He was also Jamaica’s first coffee cup-tester.

I was given a tour of the factory. The cherry berries are ‘floated’ first of all; light, substandard beans are raked off and the good beans are then sluiced gradually down to the pulpers. Chuntering machines spin and strip off the skin, spitting out coarse white beans called ‘wet parchment’. These are fermented in vats for three days to remove the last of the berry-flesh. The wet parchment is then cured, by drying for five days on the barbecue, turned regularly by men walking briskly back and forth pushing toothy wooden rakes. Too much moisture or rain causes mustiness in the eventual taste and so the beans area heaped up at night against the dew. The ‘dry parchment’ is bagged and taken to the warehouse to be ‘rested’.

After about 20 weeks the rested beans are brought out again, warmed for a short time on the barbecue and taken off in wheelbarrows to be hulled. The eventual product, after the parchment has been hulled and blown to remove dust and chaff, is ‘green bean’, which is sorted, sized and bagged or packed in barrels (of ash or oak so that it does not take up an alien flavour) for export. Some roasting takes place at Mavis Bank; the green beans are cooked to a matt dark-tan and then cooled quickly in a vicious-looking merry-go-round. Then they are ground; with a heady smell of fresh coffee and a series of pneumatic hisses and sucks the grounds are put into tins and packaged.

Keeble Munn speaks with obvious enthusiasm about a lifetime’s work handling coffee. ‘Resting,’ he says, ‘is some mystic thing we don’t understand, but the flavour is definitely improved by it.’ He thinks of the beans as sensitive and delicate: ‘If I put a woman with a lot of perfume in a room with my coffee, then it will come out tasting of the perfume, but not the other way round. Coffee must be treated with great care.’

It still seems a bit of an enigma quite how Blue Mountain manages to command such astronomical and disproportionate prices on the international market. Most of the UK coffee importers view it with good-humoured bemusement and marvel quietly at it (it is very profitable), but they acknowledge the extremely fine product and then wish the Jamaicans luck with it. There’s just no accounting for taste apparently.


On which, I brought a bag of roasted beans home with me from Jamaica (where you buy at a bargain price of course) and set about making some. According to Giles Hilton Blue Mountain is not supposed to be a strong coffee: it is medium roast and mellow. This certainly held out in my own experience. Blue Mountain has an excellent, smooth and sweet taste in the mouth and a very pleasant aftertaste. An extremely satisfying cup of coffee.

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