Why Does Huila Coffee Taste the Way It Does?

Colombia is the second-largest producer of arabica beans after Brazil. Coffee arrived in the early eighteenth century with Spanish Jesuit missionaries, and after the Thousand Days' War the industry became smallholder-dominated; the FNC was founded in 1927. The Huila region is known for refined fruit acidity, nutty flavors, and a caramel-like finish.

Volcanic ash soil in Huila supports those flavor notes, and high-altitude washed lots are often roasted medium-dark for use across brewing methods. Colombian arabica bean production also includes lots such as Finca La Divisa's Ombligon and Sidra, the latter tied to a 2019 WBC champion title.

Although Colombia is not a large country, it is the world's second-largest producer of Arabica coffee after Brazil. From the early 18th century, when Spanish missionaries brought coffee to this land, to the formation of a smallholder-dominated industry after the Thousand Days' War, and then to the founding of FNC in 1927, Colombian coffee has traveled a tumultuous road. This article traces the historical threads of Colombian coffee and takes a deep dive into the most renowned Huila region—where volcanic ash soil gives the coffee refined fruit acidity, nutty flavors, and a caramel-like finish. Front Street Coffee selects high-altitude washed Huila as an everyday bean, with a medium-dark roast suitable for various brewing methods; there are also Finca La Divisa's Ombligon and Sidra, the latter having helped a competitor win the 2019 WBC champion title. At the end of the article, we include the steps for making Sidra cold brew iced coffee for enthusiasts to reference.

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Coffee has long been integrated into people's daily lives. When you pick up that morning cup that combines acidity, sweetness, bitterness, and astringency, you may have already noticed that coffees from different regions have their own distinctive flavors. Brazilian beans are soft and smooth, Ethiopian beans have bright acidity, and Indonesian beans are low in acidity and full-bodied. Front Street Coffee (FrontStreet Coffee) has met many older coffee enthusiasts who, compared to today's popular fruit-bomb flavors, prefer classic Colombian coffee beans with dark chocolate notes.

History of Colombian Coffee

Don't let Colombia's small land area fool you—it is truly a major coffee-producing country, ranking second only to neighboring Brazil in Arabica bean production. However, like many coffee-producing countries in the Americas, before the arrival of Europeans, this cash crop originating from Ethiopia had no foothold in Colombia.

It is said that coffee cultivation in Colombia can be traced back to the early 18th century, when coffee seeds or saplings arrived on this land with the fleet of Spanish Jesuit missionaries. A Spanish missionary named José Gumilla, in his work documenting the Orinoco River (which flows through Venezuela and Colombia), explicitly wrote that he saw coffee plantations along the riverbank in 1730. This indirectly confirms that Colombia had already begun cultivating coffee before 1730.

As coffee spread across Colombia on a large scale, by the end of the 19th century it had become the country's main foreign exchange export commodity. However, the four-year "Thousand Days' War" dealt Colombia a severe blow: the population plummeted, land lay waste, and the economy stagnated. Many large coffee plantations could no longer sustain themselves and even became abandoned wastelands. To save the coffee industry, the Colombian government consolidated these wastelands and divided them into small plots, selling them at very low prices to landless farmers, who could grow coffee mixed with other crops on these lands.

Colombian National Coffee Growers Federation

Colombia's industry structure, dominated by small coffee farms, was regarded as a new and flexible industrial model. Under the influence of international coffee prices, Colombian coffee showed tremendous growth potential. However, at the time it did not occupy an important position in the global market.

To change this situation, Colombian coffee growers organized a group called the "Coffee Producers Institution" in 1904 to manage the domestic market. By 1920, a coffee grower led the push to establish the Colombian Coffee Federation to protect the interests of numerous small coffee farms. This organization subsequently grew and, in 1927, formally established a more authoritative and larger-scale organization—FNC.

FNC was founded to protect the interests of coffee growers. With its support, in the years that followed Colombia rose to become the world's third-largest coffee exporting country as a coffee producer.

As one of the classic coffee-producing countries, Colombia not only occupies a unique area on Front Street Coffee's (FrontStreet Coffee) bean list of over fifty coffee beans, but has also been selected for Front Street Coffee's (FrontStreet Coffee) everyday bean series. To let everyone taste the flavor of Colombia, Front Street has selected washed high-altitude Huila as the flagship of this region, using a medium-dark roast suitable for pour-over, drip bags, moka pots, espresso machines, drip coffee makers, and other brewing methods.

Huila Coffee Producing Region

Huila Province is located in southern Colombia, in the southern part of the Central Cordillera, in the mountainous southwest of the country, and is the most renowned specialty coffee producing region. This area is surrounded by mountains and hills, and within the region there is an active volcano that erupted in 2008, covering the entire Colombian soil with a large amount of mineral-rich volcanic ash. The planting altitude is above 1,500 meters, and Colombia's most important rivers converge here, bringing abundant water resources and moisture. Unlike the general impression of mass-market Colombian coffee as balanced and mellow, many smallholder micro-lot Colombian specialty coffees actually have very distinctive regional flavor characteristics.

In recent years, with the international market's emphasis on coffee quality and demand for specialty coffee, the previous system of grading by bean size has gradually been abandoned in favor of micro-regional selections provided by smallholder coffee farmers through micro-regional production organizations, where dozens of smallholders contribute their individual harvests to be consolidated into a micro-lot for sale. This also provides more opportunities to directly select many outstanding coffees from specific smallholders through batch-by-batch cupping.

The Huila region is naturally also the area richest in volcanic ash. Whether coffee can have better, more refined flavors depends not only on variety and altitude—the nutrients in the soil also deserve great credit. Therefore, coffee beans produced in the Huila region have refined fruit acidity, nutty flavors, and a caramel-like finish, which is also a flavor characteristic unique to coffees from southern Colombia.

On Front Street's bean list, there are also two single-origin coffees that likewise come from the famous Huila region—Finca La Divisa's Ombligon and Sidra. Sidra's fame came thanks to the 2019 World Barista Championship (WBC), where a competitor won the champion title with it, making it widely known.

Sidra, transliterated from Sidra, is also called Sydra or Bourbon Sidra by coffee farmers, and in Spanish it means "apple juice" or "apple cider." Currently, the Sidra variety is generally considered to be a hybrid descendant of Typica and Red Bourbon, and in cupping it is often described as having both the sweetness of Bourbon and the clean, delicate clarity of Typica. The Sidra that Front Street sourced uses double anaerobic natural processing, and when brewed as pour-over it has rich fruit aromas and a sweet-tart sensation, making it extremely pleasant to drink. We have also tried extracting Front Street Colombia Sidra by cold brew, iced pour-over, hot pour-over, and other methods, and found that it always expresses rich, highly sweet fruit flavors accompanied by a plant-like base note, with a round mouthfeel and relatively weak bitterness.

How to Make Sidra Cold Brew Iced Coffee?

Then pour in the target amount of water! Because Front Street uses 50g of coffee grounds, 500ml of room-temperature water will be poured in. After pouring the water, stir it to speed up the saturation of the coffee grounds!

Then the bottle can be sealed and placed in the refrigerator to chill.

Once the steeping time is up, we can take the coffee out, filter out the coffee grounds with filter paper, and enjoy delicious cold brew coffee!

The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.