Coffee Farming in Northern Ireland?
Coffee is primarily grown in ‘The Bean Belt’, the colloquial term to the countries that lie between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. It is in this geographical area that the fruit thrives; the climate is the perfect mixture of warm and wet, and the terrain – think mountains, rolling hills, rich soils and plenty of forests and jungles – isn’t half bad either. Every single major coffee producing nation lies within the Bean Belt.
But all that could change in the near future if an experiment in Northern Ireland proves to be successful. A coffee company based in Lisburn has teamed up with David Patterson, a landscape gardener, to grow coffee plants in the country.
If the plants flourish and flower, we could be discussing the origin characteristics of Ulster-sourced arabica and comparing it with the very best coffees from Ethiopia, Brazil and Yemen.
“Over the years,” begins Phillip Mills, one of the people involved with this audacious initiative, “a lot of people have asked us if we grow the coffee beans here.
“We always laugh because of course the conditions aren’t right.”
But what if the conditions were right?
That, of course, would mean growing the plants in a specially constructed environment. The pair will plant their small crop of trees indoors where they can monitor the conditions because while the United Kingdom is famed for its wet weather it’s not known for its ability to deliver 365 days of scorching hot weather.
But don’t expect entire plantations to appear overnight: “This will be a very, very small experiment,” Mills said.
“We are planning to plant 18 trees. To put that into perspective, there are 1.2 billion trees in Brazil.”
The good news is that according to Patterson the trees should be “relatively easy” to grow, as long as the conditions are right. Speaking to the BBC, he noted that he has been in direct contact with producers and farmers in established coffee-growing countries about the plan with soil acidity and ambient temperatures being a typical point of discussion.
This isn’t the first time that some bold pioneers have attempted to cultivate coffee in some rather unusual locations.
Last year, news emerged from Kazakhstan that after one successful lemon harvest one family business was eyeing upbringing coffee to the Central Asian country.
So first Kazakhstan and now Northern Ireland, could Sherburn be next?