If you are looking at the most famous and best gourmet coffees, then Jamaica Blue Mountain, Kona, and Costa Rican are most common trait. They are grown in volcanic mountain regions. Like the finest wine region of Italy and France, the best gourmet coffee have an areas were the coffee bean flavor thrives. The two most significant aspects of the best gourmet coffee are soil and altitude.

At higher elevations different factors come together in process of growing the best gourmet coffee. Late afternoon cloud cover defends the coffee plants from an undue amount of direct sunlight. The clouds comprises of moisture, which lightly waters the coffee plants through its leaves other than through its roots.

The best gourmet coffees are mainly rated with a SHB rating that means Strictly Hard Bean rating. The coffee bean full-grown at elevated altitudes is much stronger than those grown at lower elevations. This difference places the coffee bean in the group of the best gourmet coffee rating on world coffee markets.

The disadvantage of growing this coffee at much higher altitudes is the difficulty in agricultural process. Farms at this level are near the peaks of mountain formations that are very steep. You could even imagine the trouble of driving vehicles to these isolated locations with few paved roads. At times the ground is near about at a 45 degree angle making it very tricky to plant, farm, inspect and then pick the coffee beans from side of a mountain. More manual labor-intensive is necessary not only for farming but also for transporting the baskets important with the best coffee beans.

The distance of these locations also makes it a long and very difficult to transport them to the ports of allocation to world markets. The roads are frequently rough and stony winding up and down mountain sides and frequently beside an unsafe cliff. You could imagine the intrinsic danger concerned just in transporting a heavy truck load of the best gourmet coffee. The farmers would stride along side their ox drive cart dragging their payload. The farmers would paint multi-colored designs on the large wooden ox cart wheels that have become a sign of Costa Rican heritage even to this day.