Tour Cafetero Los Correa

A family coffee farm where you walk the whole road from the bush to the cup.

The owner took us round himself and it shows: he does not talk about coffee like a guide, he talks about it like someone who grows it.

Picking is not romantic. You get a basket on your waist and you go up the slope. Only the red cherries come off, the green ones stay on the bush to ripen, so you do not pick row by row, you pick bean by bean. Every bush is gone over several times a season. After half an hour you know why the coffee costs what it costs, and why so much of that work is paid so little.

Processing is a craft. They showed us what happens to the cherries next: how the bean comes out, why it is left to ferment, how it is dried, when and how it is roasted. Every step can be done faster and cheaper, and every step shows it afterwards.

And then they brewed it. Coffee from the farm you are standing on, made by the person who grew it. The taste is somewhere else entirely from anything you can buy at home, but the real thing is that it is the first time you understand it. I know what I drank and I know how much work is behind it.