North American coffee? Does coffee actually grow in North America?
The first big surprise for many people (including the one typing this, and who took grade school geography in the 70s!) is that Mexico is part of North America. It’s a geographic fact and has been for a long time.
North American coffee does indeed include other players. We would love to include California-grown coffee, professionally produced in Santa Barbara and grown in parts of So Cal such as San Diego county on a backyard scale, we don’t have a profile page yet on this production. And many have successful and productive coffee trees in the South and Florida too.
Hawaii … another tough one since it’s technically not in the North America geographic zone. We refer to it here, as well as in Oceania. Oh Canada? Nope.
Arabica coffee generally grows in limited areas between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. It cannot be exposed to anything near freezing temperatures. Even in the tropics, there are huge limitations on the suitable land and climate conditions to successfully grow coffee commercially. Hence the reason that any northern geographic zones figure so small in the arabica coffee narrative. Our part of the coffee story is to import it and drink it!
See all our Coffee Producing Region Overviews