Historical Origins and Cultural Stories of Colombian Coffee Beans

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Coffee has become a daily beverage. While enjoying that morning cup of liquid with its complete spectrum of sour, sweet, and bitter flavors, coffee enthusiasts have begun to notice that coffees from different regions possess distinct taste profiles. Brazilian coffee is smooth and mellow, Ethiopian coffee has bright acidity, and Indonesian coffee offers low acidity with rich body. FrontStreet Coffee has encountered many older coffee lovers who, compared to today's popular fruit bomb flavors, prefer classic Colombian coffee beans with dark chocolate notes.

The History of Colombian Coffee

Despite Colombia's small land area, it is a major coffee-producing country, with its Arabica coffee bean production ranking second only to neighboring Brazil. However, like many American coffee-producing nations, before Europeans set foot on this land, coffee—an economic crop originating from Ethiopia—had no presence here.

It is said that coffee cultivation in Colombia can be traced back to the early 18th century, when coffee seeds or coffee seedlings arrived in Colombia with ships carrying Spanish Jesuit missionaries. A Spanish missionary named José Gumilla wrote in his book documenting the Orinoco River flowing through Venezuela and Colombia, explicitly stating that he witnessed coffee plantations along the riverbanks in 1730.

This indirectly confirms that Colombia had already begun cultivating coffee before 1730.

As coffee cultivation expanded on a large scale in Colombia, coffee became the country's main foreign exchange export product by the late 19th century. However, the "Thousand Days War" that lasted for four years in the late 19th century devastated Colombia, with sharp population decline, devastated land, and stalled economic development.

Many large coffee plantations could not be maintained and even became abandoned wastelands. 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 mixed with other crops on these lands.

Colombian National Coffee Growers Federation

Colombia's coffee industry structure, dominated by small coffee farms, was regarded as a new and flexible industry model. Under the influence of international coffee prices at the time, Colombian coffee showed enormous 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 Producer Organization" in 1904 to manage the domestic market. Until 1920, a coffee grower led the promotion of the establishment of the Colombian Coffee Federation to protect the interests of numerous small coffee farms. This organization subsequently expanded and developed, and in 1927 formally established a more authoritative and large-scale organization, the FNC.

The establishment of FNC aimed to protect the interests of coffee growers. In the following years, with the help of FNC, Colombia became the world's third-largest coffee exporting country as a coffee-producing nation.

As one of the classic coffee-producing countries, Colombia not only holds a unique regional section on FrontStreet Coffee's bean list featuring over fifty varieties but has also been selected for FrontStreet Coffee's daily coffee series. To let everyone taste Colombian flavors, FrontStreet Coffee selected high-altitude washed Huila as the representative of this region, using medium-dark roasting suitable for various extraction methods including pour-over, coffee bags, moka pot, espresso machine, and drip coffee maker.

Huila Coffee Region

Huila Province is located in the southern part of Colombia's central mountain range, in the mountainous region of southwestern Colombia, and is the country's most famous specialty coffee producing area. This region is surrounded by hilly terrain with mountains and contains an active volcano that erupted in 2008, covering Colombia's soil with mineral-rich volcanic ash. The cultivation altitude is above 1,500 meters, and Colombia's most important rivers converge here, bringing abundant water resources and moisture. Contrary to the general impression of commercial Colombian coffee as balanced and smooth, many smallholder micro-batch specialty coffees actually possess distinct regional flavor characteristics.

In recent years, with the international market's emphasis on coffee quality and demand for specialty coffee, the original bean size grading system has gradually been abandoned in favor of micro-regional selections provided by coffee smallholders. Dozens of small farmers contribute their individual harvests to form a micro-batch for sale, thus creating opportunities to select many excellent specific smallholder coffees through batch-by-batch cupping.

Huila is naturally also the region richest in volcanic ash. Whether coffee can have better refined flavors depends not only on variety and altitude but also on the nutrients in the soil. Therefore, coffee beans produced in the Huila region possess delicate fruit acidity, nutty flavors, and caramel-like aftertaste, which are characteristic flavor features of coffee from southern Colombia.

On FrontStreet Coffee's bean list, there are also two single-origin coffees from the famous Huila region: the Maragogipe from Finca La Divina and Sidra. Sidra became famous thanks to the 2019 World Barista Championship (WBC), where it gained recognition after a contestant won the championship using it.

Sidra, transliterated from Sidra, is also called Sydra or Bourbon Sidra by coffee farmers, meaning "apple juice" or "apple cider" in Spanish. Currently, the Sidra variety is widely considered a hybrid of Typica and Red Bourbon. In cupping, it's often described as having both Bourbon's sweetness and Typica's clean clarity. FrontStreet Coffee's Sidra uses double anaerobic natural processing, possessing rich fruit aroma and sweet-tart sensation when brewed by pour-over, leaving drinkers very satisfied. We've also tried extracting FrontStreet Coffee's Colombian Sidra through cold brew, iced pour-over, and hot pour-over methods, discovering it always expresses rich, high-sweetness fruit flavors accompanied by plant-based notes, with a smooth mouthfeel and weak bitterness.

How to Make Sidra Cold Brew Iced Coffee?

Coffee dosage: 50g
Grind setting: Ek43 setting 9 (85% pass rate through #20 sieve, fine sugar grind)
Coffee-to-water ratio: 1:10
Steeping time: 12 hours
Remember to prepare a sealable container! After grinding the coffee beans into powder, the first thing to do is pour the coffee grounds into the container!

Then pour in the target amount of water! Because FrontStreet Coffee uses 50g of coffee grounds, we will pour in 500ml of room temperature water. After pouring the water, stir it to accelerate the wetting of the coffee grounds!

Afterward, seal the bottle and place it in the refrigerator to chill.

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

Important Notice :

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