I am writing this from Ponta Delgada, where the coffee in front of me was roasted about four streets away. Normally that is the whole story. Normally that is enough to keep me quietly smug until dinner. But I am in the Azores, and in the Azores the roaster is not the headline. They tell me that somewhere out there, two islands to the northwest, there are people growing the stuff.

Europe does not grow coffee. That's the rule. The coffee belt stops a continent short of us, and everything you have ever drunk in Europe arrived in a sack. Except here, where the Gulf Stream and a lot of volcanic emotion have produced a loophole. On São Jorge there is a hamlet called Fajã dos Vimes, home to about a hundred people, where the Nunes family has farmed coffee for generations and will pour it for you a few metres from the plants. Their neighbours at Quintal do Café do the same on a plot worked by hand. On Terceira, Coffee Cabana grows its beans among the fruit trees and serves them at the counter, as a brew and as a latte, so you can taste the same harvest two ways. A hamlet with more coffee plantations than streetlights. I have spent years being dull about cafés that name the farm. Here the farm is behind the till.

Sadly I'm not going… not out of principle, but out of ferry timetables. The Azores are nine islands flung across six hundred kilometres of Atlantic, and my trip has the shape of a person who booked the flights first and discovered that coffee grows here second. So I am doing my drinking in Ponta Delgada, which is the right archipelago but the wrong island, and I am pleased to report the capital holds its end up. Intz48 roasts on São Miguel and runs its espresso across three single origins, which is more than plenty of mainland cities can claim. And CASCARA hides a proper multi-method coffee programme underneath a brunch queue that talks exclusively about the French toast and eggs Benedict.

But… it turns out there is a farm on this island too, up on the slopes of the Fogo volcano, and that one I did reach. Pete's Volcanic Coffee ↗ is the name on the map; Pedro is the man behind it. It took a WhatsApp message, and then directions with a plot: Google's suggested road was blocked by a river, so I got sent the other way, a windy route that ends in the middle of the farm rather than at the edge of it. Pedro worked his way around the world for thirty-odd years, sold his house in Lisbon, and came back to the island he was born on to buy land inside a nature reserve. Then he planted coffee on it. He has around six thousand plants now, yellow varieties and red, both arabica. He told me exactly which cultivars they were, and I, a man who runs a coffee website, wrote down none of it, too busy staring at the trees. Between the rows he has planted his own windbreaks and shade trees, plus trial plots of whatever he wants to see take: feijoa, tamarillo, natal plum, bananas. The reserve keeps everything organic whether he likes it or not (turns out he likes it).

The really fascinating bit is this: the microclimate up there barely moves, so the plants have no calendar. No seasons means no harvest time, which means one branch carries white flowers and ripe cherries at the same moment. Every cherry gets picked by hand, carefully, because grabbing at this harvest would knock the blossom off the next one. The confused plant is doing everything at once and the humans have to work around it. A share of the yield is already spoken for, contracted to a mainland roaster for the next several years under a label with Impossible in the name, which feels about right.

And then he made me coffee. His own beans, brewed in a moka pot, at a farm with no café for miles, next to a plate of homemade coconut cookies. Clearly I have endless opinions about brew methods, and I will admit the moka pot has not always been top of that list. Consider this a formal correction… coffee grown on a European volcano, brewed by the man who grew it, in whatever pot his kitchen happened to have, is just perfect. There is no counter up there and legally there cannot be one; the reserve will not allow a building, so he is buying the plot next door, just over the line, where a café can one day stand. Until then you cannot buy this cup anywhere on earth. You have to be given it.

So thanks to the loophole, the Azores page is now live on the site, five cafés across three islands, the only page we have where the interesting question is not who roasts the coffee but who grew it and where.

One of the best cups in the archipelago is not on it, because you cannot walk in anywhere and order one. But if Pedro fulfils his dream, you will be able to. Give it a year or two.

Richaro