How to Choose a Coffee Tour in Colombia
You’ll find hundreds of them. Many cost fifteen dollars, leave by bus from Salento, and end at a souvenir shop. Others cost two hundred and hand you a chapolera hat for the photo. Almost all of them lean on the same three words: authentic, traditional, unforgettable.
We’ve been doing this for 12 years in Pijao, a small town in southern Quindío, and in that time we’ve learned that the difference between a good coffee tour and a bad one isn’t the price, and it isn’t the photos. It’s five questions almost no one asks.
1. Will I meet the coffee grower, or an employee who explains the process?
This is the question that decides everything. There’s a world of difference between someone who explains how coffee is grown and someone who grew it. The second one has dirt under their nails and a different answer for every strange question you throw at them.
Ask for the name. The full name of the man or woman who got up before dawn to pick the ripest cherries. If they can’t tell you, you already know what kind of tour this is.
2. Is the farm real, or is it a set?
Some farms exist for tourism. You can tell: the paths are too perfect, no one’s actually working, and lunch tastes like it came from a restaurant.
On a real farm, people live there. There’s a dog that adopts you for the day. There’s a lunch cooked by the family that lives there, made with whatever they had on hand. One traveler wrote in his account that his host, gesturing at the plate, told him:
“The only thing you’re eating that didn’t grow on this land is the potato and the rice.”
Nobody scripts a line like that.
3. How many of us will there be?
Forty people on a bus isn’t an experience — it’s a line. Our limit is 10, and it’s not a marketing whim: past that number, the coffee grower stops being the protagonist and becomes the scenery. That’s the line we hold, even when it costs us sales.
4. Where does the money go?
Here’s the uncomfortable truth about Colombian coffee, and it deserves its own article: much of the coffee people drink in Colombia is what’s left over from the export process. The growers themselves call it, with no euphemism, coffee trash.
Ask whether you’ll be able to buy coffee directly from the person who grew it. If the answer is yes, something is being done right.
5. Can I ride in a Willys?
It sounds like a silly question, and it’s a litmus test. The Jeep Willys isn’t a folkloric prop — it’s the vehicle people in these mountains actually use, for groceries, for sacks of grain, for their kids. If the tour uses one, it’s because it goes where people live. If they put you in an air-conditioned van, they’re taking you where tourists go.
So which one is the best?
We’re not going to tell you it’s us — of everything on this list, that would be the least believable answer. Ask the five questions. Ask us too, and don’t give us a discount for being the ones who wrote them. What we answer — and what everyone else answers — will tell you more than any website.
