The area on which Blue Mountain can be grown under regulated conditions is limited to 6,000 hectares. Accordingly the harvest is small, and picking is by hand exclusively. Only around 900 tonnes of Blue Mountain Coffee are harvested each year, less than 0.1 per cent of Colombia’s coffee production. It is only once the experts of the Coffee Industry Board of Jamaica (CIB) have certified the select green coffee that it is exported in wooden barrels. Up to 80 per cent of the  harvest goes to the Japanese market, where passionate coffee connoisseurs are happy to pay up to USD 10 and more for a cup. The coffee’s intense, clear, almost nutty taste makes it a unique experience. Britain’s Royal Family has savoured this coffee since the colonial period. And anyone who has read Ian Fleming’s 007 novels knows that the eponymous hero drinks only Blue Mountain Coffee (the author himself lived on Jamaica for many years).
Jamaican coffee has been internationally famous from as far back as the eighteenth century and gained particular prominence in the nineteenth century when many of the natives turned to growing the crops on their own land. Most of those farmers chose the mountains, including the rugged and very steep slopes of the Blue Mountains for planting.