We left the apartment around 8 am with our guide for the day, Rodolfo, in his way-too-small-for-the-four-of-us hatchback to drive southwest toward a coffee farm, our destination for the day. The traffic is horrendous in Bogotá, even in the early morning on a Sunday. We drove through the new subway system construction for an hour or so all the way to the suburbs. Once the elevated train is finished (they’re saying a year from now) it will be a serious gift of commuting time saved for the people living so far out from the center of town.
Rodolfo turned off the highway and took the mountain road which led through beautiful, lush, green countryside of two lane winding roads, up to 2,600 meters through Soacha and Sibaté, then down through Silvania to Fusagasugá and the noticibaly warmer climate of the coffee farm at roughly 1,700 meters. We encountered a million bikers and lots of cows amid the beautiful scenery.
The mountainous stretch is where Bogotanos stop on weekends to eat strawberries and cream on their way out of the city in search of country farms and recreation. Sibaté is dairy and strawberry country, one of Colombia’s most important strawberry producers, and “fresas con crema” stands line the road, some at working farms. There are also vendors selling food, orchids, and furniture made from wicker and bamboo. We saw lots of signs for “chigüiro”; Rodolfo said this is capybara (the world’s largest rodent, known as carpincho in Argentina), considered a delicacy here. They salt and dry it, then grill it over coals.
Fusagasugá calls itself the Ciudad Jardín (mild year-round), it is a city of maybe 100,000 people and has the perfect climate for coffee making. Hacienda Coloma is outside town and is a working colonial-era estate rather than a big plantation.
We all thought this farm was more beautiful in many ways than your average winery in Mendoza, primarily because of the wide variety of plants and trees. Coffee grows under shade (shade-grown coffee is more acidic and less bitter), and the whole farm is under trees, mostly fruit trees including lots of oranges hanging over all the paths between the coffee plant groves. The ocobo trees were bare-branched and dropping pink flowers everywhere making for a beautiful scene. Almost every tree had bromeliads growing in the crooks of the branches, and the high branches had long grey beards of Spanish moss hanging off them. The Colombian’s call this “barba de viejo” (old man’s beard). There were also huge staghorn ferns hung in baskets under the eaves of one porch. And we learned the big-spined rosette plant resembling an aloe is called a fique. Coffee sacks are made from its fiber. And there were tons of orchids all over the farm, as well.
Our tour started with instructions to don a special hat and basket for the sun and for coffee bean picking (see photos). We got the full treatment: first we picked beans, then we walked through all the stages of coffee production.
You pick red “cherries” (what the beans are called on the plant) only. Coloma is a small operation, so they hire only a few pickers for each of two month-long harvests a year. Following the harvest, the production is rather lengthy and complicated. What struck me was how difficult and how slow each step is. No wonder coffee is so expensive!
First, they strip the red skin off, leaving two beans inside a layer of slippery mucilage. Next, the cherries go into water. Good ones sink. The light, hollow, borer-damaged ones float up and get skimmed off the top. Overnight in tanks for twelve to eighteen hours the beans are then fermented until the mucilage breaks down. Then they are rinsed clean in big vats. The beans are then dried down to ten or twelve percent moisture. Our guide showed us both ways they do it: in the sun, under a roof that slides on and off because the weather here is so unpredictable. And in a machine, which is what they use for drying for most of the harvest, because of the rain.
At this stage it’s called pergamino, with just the bean inside a dry papery husk. Our guide asked us to try to take off this last husk with our fingernails, which is next to impossible! They have a machine for that, too. Then the beans are sorted by size before roasting.
We also learned about seeding coffee. It’s 9 months from seed to seedling ready to be potted. Then 2 months more of hardening off, then 2 years before the mature plant makes beans. Again, no wonder coffee costs a fortune!
We also learned that nothing is wasted along the way, the broken and worm-eaten beans, the stems (everything that floats) has a name: pasilla. It’s washed and dried like the rest and sold to folks who want to make coffee out of it anyway. They roast it very dark so the defects don’t show, and it often shows up in the domestic market or in instant coffee.
The guide also told us the coffee they make here is much weaker than what we’re used to. She was right. It’s brewed by steeping rather than under pressure, in a much lower ratio of grounds to water (same as we saw in Medellín). Very different from what we normally drink.
Rodolfo was ready and waiting by by 2 pm. About twenty-five minutes up the highway there’s a cluster of roadside restaurants in Granada, and we ate at El Alto de las Arepas, which has been run by the same family for 40 years. It’s a real production. They churn out this Columbian semi-fast food fare like clockwork in an enormous open kitchen. You take a number and they bring your order 5 minutes later. We had ajiaco santafereño, the Colombian version of classic chicken soup, thickened with potato, served with rice and avocado, and cheese bread on the side. All really yummy.
Vaca Que Ríe is the dessert place next door with a huge green and white sign, “Postres y Lácteos.” It started in the early seventies, when a milk trader began making cheese here to sell to the cars on the newly opened Panamericana highway, and it has since spread into a small empire of desserts and dairy. We went in and looked around but decided to skip dessert after our big meal.
On the way back, the traffic was, again, horrendous! Painfully slow due to the subway construction and weekend tourists in our very cramped little car, the return trip was over 3 hours, but we made the best of it. About half way home, we attempted to find a bathroom at a busy gas station/dollar store. The gas station restroom was out of service, but, thankfully, a friendly security guy at the Dollar Store took pity on us and led us to the employee restroom in the back. It was the best, cleanest bathroom in all of Colombia!
Day 7 Bogotá photos/videos here:
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