Coffee culture in Colombia’s Jardín
Tare more than 20 restaurants and cafes that sell coffee by the cup in the lively pastel-splashed plaza of Jardín, a quaint Colombian pueblo, or village, nestled in the northern reaches of the Andes Mountains.
I chose one and settled in at a streetside table painted bright blue like an Easter egg, and ordered a café tinto – straight black – for 800 pesos, about 25 cents.
Coffee is at the heart of Jardín, as corn is to small town Iowa: the local economy that forms a cultural identity. When my tinto arrived, it was easy to see why: The flavour, strong and bold, flowed directly from the beans, not a burned layer from roasting.
This was why I had come: to indulge my love of coffee. And Jardín is a perfect place, in the heart of a coffee belt in southwestern Antioquia, the largestvolume coffee producer of Colombia’s 32 departments.
In the 1990s, a collapse in commodity coffee prices hit Colombia hard. Half of its coffee market value vanished, and thousands of families in coffeegrowing regions were pushed into poverty. As a strategy for the future, the Colombian government began encouraging and supporting farms to grow higher quality beans that qualify for specialty coffee markets, where prices are higher and more stable. Jardín embraced the specialty trend with gusto. Most of the beans sold at the town’s coffee cooperative warehouse go straight to Nespresso, the high-end Swiss company selling coffee makers through George Clooney on TV ads.
With the help of a hired guide – José Castaño Hernández, himself the son of coffee farmers – I was ready to see where the rich brew in my cup came from, to explore the coffee terroir of the northern Andes.
In the plaza in Jardín, Hernán- dez, 41, picked me up in his car and we drove through a military checkpoint just outside of town. After the soldiers waved us through, he told me we would be taking the scenic route to visit a coffee finca above 1,830 metres in elevation. By scenic, he meant a route for equestrians. At the mountain foothills, he parked at the roadside and we met up with another guide who had horses saddled and ready to go. The ride up a cobble-strewed path was a series of pinch-me moments – glorious vistas of the northern Andes, rays of morning sun shooting through fluffy clouds, the occasional ridiculous-beaked toucan flying by.
We stopped for lunch at the finca, a simple farmhouse near the mountaintop with white stucco walls and dandy blue trim. That same popping blue accented the pedestal for a shrine to the baby Jesus and also a cross erected at the drop-off to a million-dollar view: more than a dozen Andean peaks rolling out as far as could be seen, with bushy coffee plants climbing up every mountainside.
After our empty plates were collected, one woman poured me a cup of house coffee, served tinto. I smiled and sighed at the pure flavour: so earthy and saturating on my palate, yet exiting cleanly without a trace of aftertaste. Then the farm’s manager, Juan Crisostomo Osorio Marín, beckoned me to follow a dirt path up into the coffee bushes. Marín runs the farm’s field operations for his father, who is the owner.
We arrived at a spot where bundles of green and bright red coffee berries weighted down seemingly every branch. These are prodigious plants, each one growing the equivalent of a pound of finished, ground coffee. The red coffee berries, resembling cranberries, were ripe and ready to pick. I challenged Marín to a quick coffee-picking contest, and in 30 seconds I had 50 berries in a basket. Marín had more than 200. The trick, he showed me, was to move a hand underneath the branch while flicking berries with the thumb. In one sweeping motion he could dislodge 10 or more berries.
During harvest season, Marín, 40, will haul down several baskets of coffee berries that add up to 225 kilograms by the end of the day – this off a ridge so steep I found it somewhat difficult to stand up straight.
Still, the production here pales to the output on corporate coffee plantations. The Marín family emphasises quality over quantity. Nespresso grades these beans as Triple A, its highest rating for quality and sustainability.
Marín said three factors favoured his coffee: the elevation, which is high enough to keep pestiferous coffee borer bugs at bay; the humidity, which stems from passing clouds that provide a steady stream of moisture; and the red soil.
“Porqué?” I asked: Why is the soil so red? Hernández told me about Nevado del Ruiz, a volcano in the northern Andes that sprinkled ash across the mountaintops.
“A good thing?” I asked Marín through Hernández.
“Sí, claro, claro,” Marín said, nodding his head. The answer came back through my guide that the ash made these soils rich and fertile: “Like a blessing, the land is better up here.”
Back at the farmhouse, I got a tour of the depulping grinder that expunges beans from the fruit, and the drying rack for beans before they go to the coop. For 15,000 pesos (about $5), I got a bag of his Triple A coffee and thanked Marín.
On the ride back to Jardín, Hernández told me I was only his second coffee tourist in seven years of guiding. All of his other clients are birders, but he would like to do more trips like this, as his grandfather settled and started the coffee farm nearby where he grew up.