Our hour mountainous bicycle tour brought us to Don Elisa's Finca in Salento, Colombia. There were four of us and we had timed it perfectly to get a private tour with Don Elisa's grandson Carlos.

“You can see the whole process of coffee here,” Carlos explained. “You can see that it’s very easy, very simple.”

Carlos said this matter of factly about Don Elisa’s Finca in Salento. He led us through his grandfather’s plantation, summarizing the four hectors of a coffee consumer’s paradise with such precision and detail. An expert, an early twenties expert, who had grown up in New Jersey and returned to work with his family—running tours in English, Spanish, and French.

The last thing we were thinking when Carlos said this, surrounded by coffee plants, was that growing coffee in Colombia was easy.

“It’s simple, but it takes a lot of time and a lot of work,” he finally adds.

The process takes years actually. It takes at least two years to raise a healthy coffee plant which means that any serious coffee farmer must invest time and energy into an operation that won’t yield any profit or quality product for two years. Luckily once the coffee plant has matured, it’s life is long and fruitful.

“The average life of a coffee plant is 25 years. After 25 years the plants don’t produce anymore,” Carlos said. “But here we only work with the plants for 17 (years), because after 17, the quality and the quantity is no good. Something change(s) in the plant(s).”

These plants were old, some ten years older than the devices used by tourists to capture and share their beauty.

"It’s possible to see the difference in the size of the plant, the color in the leaves, and the quantity of the beans,” he said. “Plants of four and five years produce six to seven kilos of beans, in comparison to the average yield of four kilos at any other point in the life of a coffee plant.”

It’s evident in just a matter of feet the difference in the plants. The youngest plants soaking in the urgent rays of sunshine, bright and budding with fresh flowers, and those of many years thick and less vibrant all shaded from the sun.

When we left La Floresta hostel in Salento that morning, we knew we would find a coffee farm, but we were stunned to find so many banana trees in the oasis of coffee.

“It’s the perfect plant,” Carlos explained. “Here we use both banana and plantain for shade. When the fruit dies, it’s good for compost. (It) gives to the soil nitrogen, potassium, (and) phosphorus and that is very important for the coffee plants.”

Bananas and coffee in perfect harmony, and when Colombia was suffering from a six-month drought due to El Nino, the banana trees provided water for the soil and intern for the coffee plants.

For the tour, we weaved through informal pathways, scoping out the wildlife and guessing what plants lie ahead. The farm was run by Diaethria phlogeus butterflies, brightly colored and marked uniquely by their racing numbers: 89 and 98.

It was a grand forest with much more than coffee. Avocados, bananas, mandarins, oranges, two kinds of pineapples, and red hot chilies all in an abundant existence.

“We use the chilies for the insects,” he said. “We take some chile, mix with the water and spray it on the coffee plants. The insects don’t like the flavor or the smell. It’s a natural pesticide.”

The farm is all organic and because of this, it’s a more expensive process that requires more attention to the plants, and more planning in keeping them healthy. All the fruits and vegetables grown on the farm serve a purpose towards the coffee plants whether its shade, a distraction for the insects, or for the flavor.

“The orange, lime, and mandarin trees we use more for the soil. Those trees (provide) acid (to) the ground, and then the flavor of the coffee is very smooth.”

Colombian coffee is known for being acidic, tangy at times, and discovering that the reason was something so natural as acidic fruits, was as if removing the blindfold in a taste test.

We were quite lucky in visiting the family farm in July, the offseason for the harvests, which Carlos says is their busiest times. Everybody wants to see the process. The plantation undergoes a harvest twice a year. First between April and May and the second is between November and December. Incredibly, the process is all done by hand.

"In Colombia, we don’t have (a) machine made for collection and in this farm, sometimes it is necessary (to have) eight people—two people from the family and six people from other farms—for two or three months, every day, from 6 am to 6 pm. It’s 12 hours of collection.”

This is a little more than what he initially described as an easy process. But this was very typical of the Colombian way. In our two months of travel through Colombia, we noticed that Colombians worked hard and complained very little. There was a sense of humility when they described the labor of life in South America. Perhaps there was no sense in groaning over the necessities of life. Coffee is, after all, the biggest export for Colombia and Colombia is the third largest exporters in the world. It’s a cemented way of life that Don Elisa and over 300,000 other farmers in the country abide by. Many of them in the Quindío region, at 1,895 feet, where the elevation and climate are perfect in the Cocora Valley for growing Arabica beans—60% rain and 40% sunshine.

Through the sun and the rain, the coffee plants begin to bud. The coffee blossoms, delicate and white, bloom for only five days. The flowers can be used for tea and because of its sweet smell, blossoms are collected for the use of perfume.

“It’s possible to make perfume and coffee from a coffee plant,” Carlos said. “But not both.”

When the flower falls, the small green part is the new coffee bean. Once the new beans have ripened taking on a deep cherry red color, the beans are collected and the process moves to back of the house for shelling, washing and drying.

It’s a small area, equivalent to the size of a one-car garage, held up with Bamboo in which the serious production of coffee takes place. The beans are first shucked of their outer layers, using a machine that cranks through 40kilos of beans an hour.

“It looks very old because we use this machine every year for 8tons of coffee,” Carlos said.

The freshly shucked beans are set to ferment in a barrel overnight. Then they’re submerged in water and washed. This part of the process separates the good beans from the bad beans.

“When we put coffee beans in the water, some of the beans float to the top. The others sink in the bottom. The coffee beans that float, are bad quality.”

The beans float when the space between the actual bean and the second shell has hollow spots where the bean may not have grown to its full potential. It’s a lack of nutrients or some other effect that causes a few bad beans in a batch. It’s natural.

The floating beans at Don Elisa’s farm are washed, dried and then ground for compost as opposed to bigger farms who sell their (wise) to corporate companies like Illies, Nescafe, and even Starbucks. Bigger brand coffee companies can produce larger amounts of coffee at low costs when they mix good quality beans and bad quality beans together. Carlos even explained that the capsule companies (Keurig) are using 60% of this bad quality, 20% of good quality and the other 20% is branches and leaves from the coffee plants.

The good beans at Don Ellis's, the ones that sink, are laid out to dry in a tipi-shaped green house—exposed on either side. Beans take eight days to dry in the summer and 25 days to dry in the winter. Once they are dried the second shell is cracked and removed to expose the green beans, fresh and rich in sweetness. The final stages of production are detailed in the specified roasts.

“One hour without water, without oil, without sugar. And always we must stir so the coffee doesn’t burn. And after one hour this coffee has flavor, color, and smell. Normally after 45minutes, the coffee is ready, but the flavor is very small. One hour like this, is a medium roast, 80-90minutes is called a dark roast and the flavor is very strong,” Carlos explained. “Always people think that when the coffee is strong in flavor, the coffee is very high (in caffeine). That’s not it. When the coffee is (light), the coffee is very, very high (in caffeine).”

The rich smells from the coffee slow roasting over a fire were enticing. The beans were taking on a rich color, ready for consumption. Carlos had all seven of us in the group take turns grinding the roasted beans which he used to brew seven fresh cups of coffee. With each crank of the handle, we were partaking in the home grown roots of Colombia’s greatest production.

Small farms like this are exporting over 70% of their production each year. Only 30% from a small farm like Don Elsias stays in the region, or that might be sold to an ever rotating door of curious tourists. Somehow this altered the whole experience, challenged me to inhale all the details of production that we’re done on such a grand scale. Over 40 tons of coffee was grown in just four hectors and even the smallest of beans would be exported as far as Southeast Asia. And yet here we were, huddled around the ancient instruments of making coffee, where our tour guide in baggy jeans and shaggy hair joked about his grandfather not paying him to be a tour guide.

This place was massive, but not in physical size. Instead, it was massive in the sense of the coffee culture. This image of the hardworking coffee farmer was a hidden and yet integral part of each cup of coffee in cafes across the globe. It was hidden and it was humble and perhaps that’s why so many people flocked to places where coffee or even wine is grown. We, the suburban dwellers are intrigued by this grand scale of things. We’re amazed that making good coffee is still at the hands of talented and hardworking farmers, or far off places.

It is in fact, as Carlos said, simple. It’s simply a way of life, not a movement. It’s simply plants, not production. It’s simply coffee.

But it’s simply the best coffee in the world.

Itching To Go To Salento?

Despite the well versed stories of Salento, it's a difficult place to get to. Difficult meaning, there's no direct route. Most travelers get to Salento via a town called Armenia. It's a cheap 20 minute local bus ride up the mountain to Salento from Armenia.

Our route was from Bucaramanga—Armenia

Bolivarian $49,000COP ($16 USD) 13hrs

Bogota—Armenia

Bolivarian $59,000COP ($20 USD) 8hrs

Cali—Armenia

Bolivarian $34,000COP ($12 USD) 3.5hrs

Armenia— Salento

From the Main bus station in Armenia they have local buses that head to Salento costing less than 15,000COP ($5USD)

Places To Stay

La Floresta Hostel $12USD/night for 8person mixed dorm

**We loved La Floresta Hostel not only because it was affordable and they provided fresh free coffee from the region, but because they allowed for camping in their courtyard. They provided tents complete with a fluffy mattress and all the bedding for under 20,000 COP ($7USD). The staff was also incredibly friendly and helpful. They provided accurate and detailed information for where to eat and how to explore without the help of a tour guide. They provided rainboots for guests who were hiking in the cocoa valley, and rented bikes to those wanting to mountain bike the coffee region.