In the Zona Cafetera, we visited several coffee plantations.
For more photos of Colombia, see January/February 2012 January/February 2008
From the cute little town of Salento in the Zona Cafetera we walk to the coffee plantation of Don Elias. With his white moustache and wide-brimmed hat, Don Elias looks like the cliché South American coffee farmer. He is not originally from the Zona Cafetera, but from a coffee area in the Cauca Valley near Cali. This plot of only four hectares in a deep ravine near the tourist town of Salento he bought about 7 years ago. Besides coffee plants he also has banana and plantain trees. In contrast to the large-scale and meticulously coordinated procedures on the Hacienda Venecia and other large coffee farms we have visited, Don Elias does everything by hand. For the peeling of the beans he uses a kind of hand-mill, then he dries the beans with solar power – on the floor of a vinyl-covered greenhouse. The dry green beans that he does not need for himself, Don Elias sells to the coffee cooperative. The roasting of the remainder is done on an open fire stove in a pan.
We pick some ripe coffee beans together with Don Elias and try out the peeling mill and the grinding mill.
And of course at the end of the tour a cup of coffee is waiting for us. No fancy electric Espresso machine this time – Don Elias brews his coffee in a cotton coffee sock, as do most people in Colombia.
Since 2011, the Zona Cafetera has UNESCO World Heritage status.
The tour is conducted in Spanish, but Don Elias speaks slowly and is used to explaining the procedures to foreigners who speak only little Spanish.
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