Dominican Republic Coffee Rich And Robust
Coffee is the Dominican Republics national non-alcoholic drink. Everybody drinks it. To refuse an offer of a cafecito is seen as ungracious at best, and sometimes downright unpatriotic!
Dominicans historically have actually been accustomed to a lesser refined coffee that was made in the campo or countryside. This was before “better” international coffees were introduced and based on their higher qualities, domestic coffees such as Café Santo Domingo followed suit by refining the coffee they were selling.
Dominican coffee is short, very sweet and extremely strong. Short because it is served in a small, espresso-sized cup, sweet because it is made with generous enamel-stripping amounts of sugar, and strong enough to make your hair stand up straight if you”re not used to it. It goes without saying that Dominican coffee is delicious, and a well-deserved source of intense national pride.
Coffee is usually drank black or solo (by itself). A café con leche (white coffee) is confusingly known as a “medio pollo” – literally “half a chicken”. There is no particular time of day for drinking coffee – you may be offered a cup at any hour.
Today, sweet coffee is the standard way of drinking Dominican coffee, and most Dominicans brew it together with the sugar. However, real Dominican coffee connoisseurs say that diluting coffee with sugar takes away from its natural flavor. There are some rare cases where the drinker prefers it amargo, or bitter, but this is not very common. Sugar is the Dominican Republic”s main cash crop, even more important to the national economy than coffee, and to refrain from consuming it may be seen as an insult. As for people who don”t even drink coffee, they are considered to be lost causes.
Dominican Coffee beans are cultivated in several parts of the Dominican Republic – the remote lush mountainsides of the south western provinces of Azua, Bani and Bahoruco, and the verdant slopes of the northern cordilleras in Moca, San Francisco and Salcedo, among others. Coffee is originally from Africa and was brought over to the island of Hispaniola in the eighteenth century by the Spanish colonists and soon became a lucrative farming product as well as a national obsession. The coffee that is produced in the Dominican Republic is Arabica, generally held to be the superior variety. You can buy Dominican Coffee Online.
Coffee beans are actually seeds of coffee cherries. These cherries grow on coffee trees and turn bright red when they ripen. They are found in clusters along the branches of a coffee tree. The outer layer of the cherry is bitter, however, the fruit underneath is sweet and has the look and feel of the inside of a grape. Below that is a heavy, slimy substance which surrounds the bean and helps to protect it.