The truth about the coffee Colombians drink
Colombia grows some of the best coffee in the world. And Colombians, more often than not, end up with what’s left over.
That’s not our opinion. It’s the word growers themselves use when the cameras are off: pasilla. The defective bean, the one that didn’t make the export cut. One of them put it even more bluntly, in an article we published years ago:
“Most of the coffee people drink in Colombia is the trash of the whole process.”
It hurts to read that. It hurts more to understand why it happens.
The logic is simple — which is exactly why it’s hard to break
Good coffee earns dollars, and it earns them somewhere else. The grower sells the harvest. The harvest leaves. And the domestic market gets stocked with whatever’s left. Nobody designed this to cause harm — it’s simply what happens when a product is worth more far from where it’s born.
The result is strange, and sad: a whole country grows up surrounded by coffee farms, and grows up drinking bad coffee. Worse still: coffee growers who have never tasted their own coffee properly roasted.
What we try to do
We don’t export. And it’s not for lack of interest or buyers — it’s on purpose.
Our bet is that the good coffee stays here, and that whoever drinks it knows exactly whose hands it passed through. No middlemen: the traveler buys directly from the producer, at the farm, face to face. Carlos Arturo, for instance, sells his own coffee in the plaza in Pijao — he grew it, roasted it, and bagged it himself. When someone buys a bag from him, there’s no one standing in between.
That doesn’t fix the country’s model. But it changes, cup by cup, who keeps the value.
Why it matters to taste it there, not here
A coffee carries the flavor of the land it grew in, and that flavor gets decided, finally, in the roast — which is exactly where almost all of Colombia’s cheap coffee gets ruined.
When you drink it at the farm, freshly roasted, next to the person who planted it, two things happen. The first is obvious: it tastes different. The second takes longer to land, and it’s the one that matters: you understand that coffee isn’t a drink, it’s a chain of people. And a cup of coffee is never quite the same once you’ve seen what’s on the other end of that chain.
We are all coffee people
We wrote that line — Cafeteros somos todos, “we are all coffee people” — years ago, and it still sums it up. You don’t need to own a farm for Colombian coffee to be your business. All it takes is asking where the cup in your hand actually came from.
If the answer is just “Colombia,” they haven’t told you anything.
