Coffee grows well in rich volcanic soil and Arabica coffee does best at high altitudes such as in the Andes of Western Colombia. However, there are many other regions of the world with volcanic soil such as the East Indies and South Pacific. Dutch traders carried coffee from East Africa and planted it in the islands of what is today Indonesia. From there it spread throughout the South Pacific. Although coffee from the South Pacific does not grow at 7,000 feet as in Colombia it does grow at altitudes up to three thousand feet on volcanic islands in the South Pacific.

Coffee from Java

The reason that coffee is often referred to as Java is that the Dutch grew coffee on the island of Java in the 1500s. Part of modern day Indonesia, Java has rich volcanic soil which is common to regions of the world like the region around Manizales, Colombia where great coffee grows. Although Java today is just one of the places where coffee is grown it is by no means the dominant supplier of coffee that it was centuries ago.

Coffee from Tonga

A region in the South Pacific where coffee grows was in the news recently because of the eruption of an undersea volcano. Tonga is a collection of islands East of Australia and North of New Zealand. These islands exist because of millions of years of volcanic activity. Although Tonga has many low-lying islands it also has mountains with elevations of up to 3,000 feet. Arabica coffee is grown on the islands of Tongatapu, ‘Eua and Ha’apai.

Coffee from the South Pacific

The vast majority of coffees grown in the South Pacific (85%) are Robusta and only 15% are Arabica. Nevertheless, South Pacific coffees in general are known to be only moderately acidic and quite smooth. Coffee leaf rust devastated coffee plantations in Ceylon, the Indonesian archipelago, and the South Pacific in the 19^th century before moving across Africa to reach Brazil in the 1900s and eventually the rest of the Western Hemisphere. Some Arabica coffee stains in the region evolved to be more resistant to coffee leaf rust (such as on the Island of Timor) and thus, Arabica coffee is grown in the South Pacific along with much more leaf rust resistant Robusta.

South Pacific Volcanoes

The richness of the soil in this region is largely because of its volcanoes. For example, the Tonga collection of islands has 33 volcanoes, three unnamed. Two last erupted in the Holocene about 12,000 years ago, another last erupted three million years ago, and one under water volcano, Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai, just erupted and continues to erupt. It is described as a once-every-thousand-years event. Satellite images taken once the initial cloud of ash cleared showed all of the islands in Tonga covered with black-grey ash. This is an ongoing, emergency situation on the Tonga islands but also an example of how volcanoes in the South Pacific have repeatedly covered these islands with fertile ash. That ash has created soil for growing excellent coffee as well as food for the inhabitants. As the following image shows, this process creates new island as well!