Coffea arabica accounts for 60% of the world's coffee production.
C. arabica takes approximately seven years to mature fully, and it does best with of rain, evenly distributed throughout the year. It is usually cultivated at an altitude between , but there are plantations that grow it as low as sea level and as high as . The plant can tolerate low temperatures, but not frost, and it does best with an average temperature between . Commercial
cultivars mostly only grow to about 5 m, and are frequently trimmed as low as 2 m to facilitate harvesting. Unlike
Coffea canephora,
C. arabica prefers to be grown in light shade. Three to four years after planting,
C. arabica produces small, white, highly fragrant flowers. The sweet fragrance resembles the sweet smell of
jasmine flowers. Flowers opening on sunny days result in the greatest number of berries. This can be problematic and deleterious, however, as coffee plants tend to produce too many berries; this can lead to an inferior harvest and even damage yield in the following years, as the plant will favour the ripening of berries to the detriment of its vegetative growth. On well-kept plantations, overflowering is prevented by pruning the tree. The flowers last only a few days, leaving behind only the thick, dark-green leaves. The berries then begin to appear. These are as dark green as the foliage until they begin to ripen, but as chlorophyll degrades and anthocyanins buildup, the plant becomes completely red or yellow depending on the variety of
C. arabica. At this point, they are called "
cherries", which fruit they then resemble, and are ready for picking. The berries are oblong and about 1 cm long. Inferior coffee results from picking them too early or too late, so many are picked by hand to be able to better select them, as they do not all ripen at the same time. They are sometimes shaken off the tree onto mats, which means ripe and unripe berries are collected together. The trees are difficult to cultivate and each tree can produce from of dried beans, depending on the tree's individual character and the climate that season. The most valuable part of this
cash crop is the beans inside. Each berry holds two
locules containing the beans. The coffee beans are actually two seeds within the fruit; sometimes, a third seed or one seed, a
peaberry, grows in the fruit at the tips of the branches. These seeds are covered in two membranes; the outer one is called the "parchment coat" and the inner one is called the "silver skin". On
Java, trees are planted at all times of the year and are harvested year-round. In parts of
Brazil, however, the trees have a season and are harvested only in winter. The plants are vulnerable to damage in such poor growing conditions as cold or
low pH soil, and they are also more vulnerable to pests than the
C. robusta plant. It is expected that a medium-term depletion of indigenous populations of
C. arabica may occur, due to projected
global warming, based on
IPCC modelling. Climate change—rising temperatures, longer droughts, and excessive rainfall—appears to threaten the sustainability of arabica coffee production, leading to attempts to breed new cultivars for the changing conditions. Gourmet coffees are almost exclusively high-quality mild varieties of arabica coffee, and among the best known arabica coffee beans in the world are those from
Jamaican Blue Mountain,
Colombian Supremo,
Tarrazú,
Costa Rica,
Guatemalan
Antigua, and
Ethiopian Sidamo. Blends consisting only of Arabica are often labelled "100% Arabica" as a sign of quality. In 2023, several large coffee roasters dropped the "100% Arabica" declaration previously residing on some of their packages and started to blend less expensive
Robusta coffee into the mix. To avoid making larger changes to the visual design of the package the Arabica label was replaced by other labeling, keeping the previous ornamental design, thereby presenting a case of
shrinkflation. In some case, the coffee is still advertised as "100% Arabica" in flyers in 2024, but is no longer declared so on the actual package. ==Strains==