Café colombiano

For most of my (relatively brief) adult life, I took a bit of pride in being the Colombian who did not drink coffee. The association between coffee and Colombia is almost as tight as that of spicy peppers and India or potato and Eastern Europe. And yet none of these quintessential crops are "native". The potato and the peppers are technically "ours", they are native to the Americas. Meanwhile, coffee is traced to the Arabic Peninsula and the Horn of Africa. I cannot deny, however, that the "tinto" (a watery black coffee) is as near and dear to Colombians as tomatoes are to Italians. Nor can I deny that my childhood memories of lazy Saturday mornings are steeped in the aroma and flavor of a very milky café con leche. Almost everyone in my immediate family grew up drinking coffee (even if in very low doses).

Still, beyond the nostalgia for the childhood café con leche accompanied by a cheesy arepa and huevos pericos, I did not understand the general public's devotion to coffee. That it was necessary to drink coffee to get through a day was really off-putting to me; I did not want to depend on a drink to live my life. And then, when I first encountered all the different contraptions for "fancy" coffee brewing as a student in Chile, I was dismissive out of ignorance.

Coffee continued to be like a distant cousin seen only at family gatherings until the day I moved to Sweden. From the Arabian peninsula to South America to Scandinavia—the coffee plant has journeyed far. However, sitting in a cozy café in Stockholm with a warm kanelbulle on a dark cold evening, the prospect of a brygkaffe didn't seem all that bad. I could then understand why the Finnish and the Swedish were the top coffee consumers in the world.

Having coffee in Sweden is how I discovered the very first reason why I did not "get" coffee. The coffee we drink in Colombia, and much of Latin America, is incredibly watered down. Not only is our coffee flavorless because of this, but it is also intolerable to drink any stronger because of how burnt the widely commercialized coffee grounds are. In Colombia, we have long been left with bottom barrel coffee, and families have done the best to make it last on a tight budget.

But, it has not always been that way. Arguably, the status quo of Colombian coffee is a relatively new state of affairs.

After discovering that drinking coffee could truly be pleasurable in Stockholm, I was much more open to reencountering coffee in my own hometown. In Bogotá, Marc and I hopped from café to bookstore to café to art gallery, and gradually we discovered what a pour-over was, what a V-60 was, what a Gesha was. At one of the coffee shops in the historic Candelaria neighborhood, the owner shared his own coffee journey with us as he brewed our cups. After growing up in one of the most troubled neighborhoods of Bogotá, he only got his very first taste of excellent Colombian coffee while abroad in South Korea. Shocked, he became convinced that all Colombians should be able to taste and enjoy what was being massively exported away as a luxury. After training as a barista, he brought café de especialidad to his neighborhood, first, before opening up a second shop in Candelaria.

So, what was Colombian coffee like before all the good beans were exported away? The answer lay much closer to me than I imagined. Wanting to share the delicious coffee with my family of avid coffee-drinkers, I invited them to a drip coffee demonstration at Xue Café. I was excited to see their reaction, but instead of the shock of novelty, it was the warm surprise of an unexpected reencounter that animated their conversation. They insisted: this was the way my great-grandfather brewed coffee. No, not with a ceramic V-60 nor with specialized water pourers and electronic scales. He fashioned his own type of "pour-overs", using cloth filters, a kettle over a fire, and the beans he had grown, picked, dried, and roasted himself. My family had not tasted a coffee like the one they were having in this specialty coffee shop since those days back on the farm.

It had only taken two or three generations for most Colombians to lose access to good quality coffee. Only now the tide is beginning to slowly turn, but good coffee remains unaffordable to many and often perceived as "fancy" and, ironically, as "foreign" and "strange".

Last year, Marc and I attempted to brew our own pour-over or drip coffee for the first time. When we left Colombia for Cyprus, we brought some coffee grounds with us, as a way of bringing along a little piece of home and its aromas. We began our experimentation with some grounds from a local Limassol roaster, wanting to save the coffee from Colombia for when we got the processes just right. We did not know then that coffee brewing would become a multi-month journey. Nor did we expect that we would end up hand-grinding our own beans.

There are plenty of issues with how the world drinks coffee, the environmental and socioeconomic impact of it all, especially when it is Nestle or another unscrupulous company that commercializes the coffee (and many "fancy" specialty shops and roasters are not at all exempt from this). But, I have also seen many small shops, roasters, and artisans fighting to make coffee fairer for everyone. It is not just about putting a nice story or name to a coffee bag. They display prominently how much coffee farmers are paid and lay bare what their profit margins are. Under these conditions that foster transparency and solidarity, when I walk into a coffee shop and see the names of the farms, the places, and the people who work hard to make coffee possible, it makes me feel a little closer to home.

- Andrea