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Café del Futuro is a four-year, $15 million climate-smart agriculture project led by NCBA CLUSA and implemented in Puerto Rico with PROCAFÉ. It is funded by the United States Department of Agriculture, but it is not run by the USDA, and an earlier version of t...

Yauco Selecto is a coffee brand, not a historical designation. It is a commercial name applied to selected coffee associated with the Yauco district of southwestern Puerto Rico, and it has circulated in international specialty markets since approximately 1990....

Puerto Rican coffee culture expresses itself through a family of traditional recipes and preparations — café con leche for the morning, cortadito and pocillo for the afternoon, coquito for the holidays, and coffee-infused flan for dessert — that together cons...

Hurricane María struck Puerto Rico on 20 September 2017 as a Category 4 storm with sustained winds of about 155 miles per hour. It crossed the island southeast to northwest, directly through the Cordillera Central where the coffee is grown. The damage to coffe...

A cupping session photographed in black and white: numbered bowls, cupping spoons and scoring slips on a table, with two people evaluating. Nothing in frame identifies where the coffee is from. Coffee sold in Puerto Rico carries grade names: High Mountain Grow...

Puerto Rico's coffee industry reached its export peak in the final decade of Spanish rule and never recovered it. In 1896 the island shipped 579,613 quintales abroad, the highest figure in the historical record. Within four years the trade had been broken by a...

Corsican immigrants arriving in Puerto Rico beginning in 1815 under the Spanish Cédula de Gracias — and continuing through the mid-19th century — settled primarily in the southwestern mountains around Yauco and Maricao, establishing the coffee haciendas that ...

Hacienda Lealtad was founded in 1830 by French immigrant Juan Bautista Plumey in Lares — one of Puerto Rico's oldest and largest coffee plantations, historically linked to the 1868 Grito de Lares independence revolt, fallen into ruin after the 1898 American ac...

A line engraving printed with the caption "COFFEE PLANTATION IN LARES.", from The Argus of 8 June 1901. Lares is a mountain municipality in the interior, not Old San Juan, and this is an engraving rather than a photograph. Café Don Ruiz is a coffee shop, roast...

The Grito de Lares — the "Cry of Lares" — was Puerto Rico's first armed uprising against Spanish colonial rule, staged on September 23, 1868 by a Revolutionary Committee organized by Dr. Ramón Emeterio Betances, lawyer Segundo Ruiz Belvis, and approximately a ...

Two Caribbean islands, two legendary mountain coffees, one ongoing debate. Jamaica Blue Mountain is the most famous coffee in the world by name — a household phrase among coffee drinkers from Tokyo to Toronto. Puerto Rico's premium coffees, especially Yauco Se...

Decades before the Chemex, the V60, or the Kalita Wave, Puerto Rican grandmothers were making the smoothest pour-over coffee in the Caribbean using a flannel sock and a wire ring. The colador de café — also called la media (the sock) or simply el colador — is ...

In the Coabey sector of Jayuya, deep in the heart of Puerto Rico's central mountain range, a Spanish immigrant named Emeterio Atienza bought a small coffee farm in the late 19th century and built what would become one of the island's most beloved single-estate...

Alto Grande is a Puerto Rican coffee brand from Lares, marketed under the phrase "the coffee of popes and kings" and sold internationally as a premium single-origin Arabica. Its promotional material describes an estate founded in 1839 and acclaim in the royal...

Casa Pueblo is a community organisation in Adjuntas, in Puerto Rico's central mountains. It began in 1980 as a fight against open-pit mining, it runs on sunlight, and it grows and sells coffee under the name Madre Isla. The coffee pays for the rest. This artic...

Hacienda Tres Ángeles is a family-run coffee farm in Adjuntas that became Puerto Rico's first certified agritourism farm. Tucked into the cordillera central beneath El Gigante Dormido — the Sleeping Giant mountain range — the hacienda produces 100% Arabica spe...

Yauco is remembered as Puerto Rico's coffee town, but it was never the island's largest coffee producer. In 1887, by the United States War Department's own survey, Yauco had 4,400 cuerdas in coffee — less than Lares, less than Maricao, less than Adjuntas, and...

The Puerto Rican coffee diaspora is the story of how café con leche, the colador (coffee sock), and the cultural ritual of the 3:00 p.m. cafecito traveled from the mountains of Adjuntas, Yauco, and Jayuya to the bodegas of Spanish Harlem, the panaderías of Ce...