Coffee has become an everyday beverage. While enjoying that morning cup with its full spectrum of sour, sweet, and bitter flavors, coffee drinkers have begun to notice that coffee from different regions tastes different as well. Brazilian coffee is soft and smooth, Ethiopian coffee has bright acidity, and Indonesian coffee is low in acidity and full-bodied. Front Street Coffee has encountered quite a few older coffee enthusiasts who, compared to today's popular fruit-bomb-style flavors, prefer the classic Colombian coffee beans with dark chocolate notes.
The History of Colombian Coffee
Don't be fooled by Colombia's small land area—it is a major coffee-producing country, and its arabica coffee bean output is second only to neighboring Brazil. However, like many coffee-producing countries in the Americas, before Europeans set foot on this land, coffee—an economic crop originating in Ethiopia—had no place here.
It is said that coffee cultivation in Colombia dates back to the early eighteenth century, when coffee seeds or coffee saplings entered Colombian soil aboard the ships of a group of Spanish Jesuit missionaries. A Spanish missionary namedJosé Gumillawrote in a book documenting theOrinoco River, which flows through Venezuela and Colombia, that he personally saw coffee plantations along the riverbanks in 1730.
This indirectly confirms that Colombia had already begun cultivating coffee well before 1730.
As coffee was planted on a large scale in Colombia, it became the country's main foreign-exchange export product by the end of the nineteenth century. However, the "Thousand Days' War" that lasted four years at the end of the nineteenth century dealt Colombia a heavy blow: the population plummeted, the land was scarred, and economic development came to a standstill.
A large number of large coffee plantations could no longer be maintained and even became abandoned wasteland that no one cared about for a time. To save the coffee industry, the Colombian government consolidated these wastelands, divided them into small planting units, and sold them at extremely low prices to landless farmers. Farmers could grow coffee and other crops together on these lands.
The National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia
Colombia's coffee industry structure, dominated by small coffee farms, was regarded as a new and flexible industrial model. Under the influence of international coffee prices at the time, Colombian coffee showed tremendous growth potential. However, Colombian coffee did not play an important role in the global market at that time.
To change this situation, Colombian coffee growers organized an institution called the "Coffee Producers Organization" in 1904 to manage the domestic market. Until 1920, a coffee grower took the lead in promoting the establishment of the Colombian Coffee Federation to protect the interests of numerous small coffee farms. This organization then continued to grow and develop, and in 1927 formally established a more authoritative and larger-scale organization—FNC.
In 1927, the National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia was founded in Medellín. It is a union that brings together 560,000 coffee-producing families from 22 departments and 590 municipalities across the country.The FNC was established to protect the interests of coffee growers. In the following years, Colombia, as a coffee-producing country, became the world's third-largest coffee exporter with the help of the FNC.
The first chairman of the FNC was Luis Mariano Ospina Pérez, the grandson of President Mariano. Under Ospina's leadership, the FNC successfully consolidated the country's coffee industry and achieved tremendous success in the global market. This initiative also enabled coffee to develop into Colombia's main export crop, forever changing Colombia's economy.
As one of the classic coffee-producing countries, Colombia not only occupies its own unique section on Front Street Coffee's bean list of nearly fifty coffee beans, but has even been included in Front Street Coffee's everyday beans series. Front Street Coffee's everyday beans series covers multiple classic coffee-producing regions. Although they do not come from famous coffee estates, they allow coffee novices to taste the main flavors of major producing regions at affordable prices, thereby understanding which regions they prefer.
After many rounds of cupping comparisons of various coffee beans of different varieties, processing methods, and producing regions, Front Street found that washed coffee beans can better express the main flavor of a producing region, whilenaturally processedcoffee beans have a stronger aroma and sweetness on top of what washed beans offer.
Therefore, Front Street Coffee's everyday beans series basically adopts the washed processing method in order to present the most basic flavors of the producing regions. One of Front Street Coffee's Colombian everyday beans comes from the renownedHuila region. The washed processing method exposes its original terroir completely, showcasing rich dark chocolate flavors with soft fruit acidity.
The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.
