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colombians_have_for_years_grown_amazing_coffee._finally_2c_they_e2_80_99re_drinking_it.___the_washington_post.pdf
the_race_to_save_coffee___the_washington_post_copy.pdf
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Colombians have for years grown amazing coffee. Finally, they’re …
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/colombians-…
The Americas
Colombians have
for years grown
amazing coffee.
Finally, they’re
drinking it.
By Anthony Faiola October 22 at 3:45 PM
Bogota, Colombia — Not so long ago, Cesar Parra’s world changed with a cup of coffee — a freshly brewed, richly aromatic
ambrosia served at one of this nation’s fast-multiplying quality cafes.
“It came as a shock, having a good cup,” said Parra, 47, a late-to-the-game coffee lover who spoke on the sidelines of a master
class for baristas. “I was born and raised in Colombia. And all my life, I’d been drinking bad coffee.”
For decades, this South American nation harbored a dirty little secret. In the land of Juan Valdez and his mule, Conchita —
the fictional characters from advertisements who have hooked the world on rich mugs of Colombian coffee since the 1950s —
it was nearly impossible to get a good cup of Joe.
The reasons are well established. The finest arabica beans from Colombia’s emerald hills were mostly exported, leaving
domestic coffee consumers to drink the proverbial dregs. Some of the coffee consumed locally actually came from cheap
imports from as far away as Vietnam. Then there’s the way filtered coffee is prepared here. The most popular style is tinto — a
weak and watery concoction with a shelf life rivaling Spam.
“Even at five-star hotels in Bogota, you’d have a hard time,” said Roberto Velez, chief executive of the Colombian Coffee
Growers Federation. “We grew the best. But Colombians just weren’t used to drinking quality coffee.”
Globalization is changing that — specifically a wave of well-traveled Colombian entrepreneurs who, along with a number of
foreign investors, are upping the quality of domestic coffee roasting and brewing. Together, they are fomenting a revolution in
Colombia’s coffee-drinking culture.
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Colombians have for years grown amazing coffee. Finally, they’re …
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In Latin America, the better-coffee trend is percolating well beyond Colombia’s borders. Supermarkets in Brazil were long
known for peddling a few cheap, lower-quality brands. But as consumers there clamor for a better brew, grocery stores are
stocking locally produced gourmet beans.
Panama, meanwhile, is world-famous for cultivating Geisha — a prized coffee variety known for its subtle, almost tea-like
favor. Yet for years, Panama was as infamous as Colombia for serving up bad brews at home. That has changed, however, with
a new crop of “third wave” coffee houses — reflecting a movement to produce and serve artisanal coffee.
In Colombia, domestic consumption of coffee — which lagged global trends for years — is skyrocketing, with experts citing the
wider availability of better-quality coffee as a major factor.
Hundreds of new cafes have opened in recent years, with much of that growth coming from just one chain, Tostao. Since
opening in December 2015, the company has democratized good coffee, offering prices so low that even maids and
construction workers can afford a quality cup.
Yet the most elaborate new brew houses are elevating coffee to an art form, replicating the almost laboratory-like cafes
pioneered by hardcore java hipsters in such places as New York, Berlin, Seattle and Tokyo. The good coffee has excited the
senses of Colombians like Parra, who feel as if they are discovering their nation’s most famous (legal) export for the first time.
An aspiring cafe owner, Parra said he became inspired after sampling the brews at one of the capital’s new high-style cafes. His
obsession drove him one recent afternoon to downtown Bogota, where he joined 14 students for classes at Varietale. One of the
capital’s hippest coffee shops, it serves, among other things, blends produced via vacuum and heat in glass siphons.
For the attendees — from simple aficionados to baristas — the classes offer the kind of minutiae about coffee qualities typically
reserved for agribusiness schools. In one exercise, students placed 12 grams of grounds from different batches into cups before
dousing them with hot water. They smelled the bouquet, then slurped and spit, as if at a wine tasting.
“As drinkers, I think Colombians only now are really understanding what good coffee tastes like,” Parra said.
Colombians began to get a taste of premium coffee at least as far back as the early 2000s, when Juan Valdez — the now-global
chain established by the national coffee federation — began opening cafes. The quality of Colombian coffee beans was already
on the rise. In the early 1990s, when coffee prices collapsed on the commodities markets, Colombia responded by encouraging
its farmers to better compete globally by producing finer varieties of beans. The government has additionally deployed experts
to help teach farmers to better judge well-balanced taste and acidity levels.
But experts say the spurt in quality coffee shops began more recently.
The idea came in large part from Colombian entrepreneurs who had traveled to Europe and the United States and experienced
coffee-drinking epiphanies. Abel Calderon, co-owner of Varietale, for instance, opened his first branch in 2015 after sampling
what Colombian coffee could taste like at cafes such as Storyville in Seattle.
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“We had to taste our coffee outside of Colombia to appreciate what it could be like here,” he said.
Pedro Gasca, a former executive with the Colombian airline Avianca, co-founded Tostao after visiting global chains like Pret a
Manger.
The concept was tweaked for Colombia. Realizing that the majority of the high-end coffee shops here were priced out of reach
for most Colombians, Tostao instead went for volume — selling coffee that has earned approving nods from specialists for as
cheap as 40 cents a cup.
Coffee drinking per capita in Colombia still lags places such as the United States, France and Brazil. But between 2009 and
2014, the most recent data available, coffee consumption soared 33 percent in Colombia, compared with 15 percent globally.
That rush to java is evident in Tostao’s rapid growth. In just 20 months, it has leapt to 200 locations — becoming as
ubiquitous in Bogota as Starbucks is in the United States.
“We discovered that Colombians — I mean all Colombians, including the working class — really wanted a good cup of coffee,”
Gasca said.
At the same time, international entrepreneurs have spotted the odd hole for better-quality coffee in Colombia’s
market. Starbucks arrived in 2014. Tyler Youngblood, a native Californian, launched a coffee-roasting operation in Colombia
in 2010. His company, Azahar Coffee Co., opened its first Bogota coffee shop in a makeshift metal container in 2013. This
month, it opened a far larger cafe.
The firm uses some of the highest-quality beans available — the kind almost always exported in the past.
“I think the point is that Colombians have a right to drink their own best coffee,” Youngblood said.
Another boost for coffee culture, local entrepreneurs say, came from peace.
The official end last year of Colombia’s half-century-long war with the left-wing FARC guerrillas, as well as an easing of
paramilitary violence in some coffee-growing regions, has opened up swaths of the country to local farm-to-table restaurateurs
and coffee shop owners, some of whom are striking deals directly with farmers.
Alejandro Gutierrez, chef at Salvo Patria — a Bogota restaurant that started as a coffee shop six years ago — recently tasted
coffee grown and roasted in the battled-scarred Meta region. Meta is not one of the country’s better-known coffee regions, and
Gutierrez was surprised by the beans’ quality. He ended up ordering batches for his restaurant, which lists coffee-growing
regions for blends on its menu in the same way it does for wines.
“That whole state was FARC territory, and you wouldn’t have thought about it before as an option for good coffee,” he said.
“But here you have this great coffee coming from there, and who knew? Well, now we know.”
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Colombians have for years grown amazing coffee. Finally, they’re …
anthony.faiola@washpost.com
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/colombians-…
Wesley Tomaselli in Bogota and Anna Jean Kaiser in Rio de Janeiro contributed to this report.
Anthony Faiola is The Post’s South America/Caribbean bureau chief. Since joining the paper in
1994, he has also served as bureau chief in Berlin, London, Tokyo, Buenos Aires and New
York, and covered global economics from Washington. ! Follow @Anthony_Faiola
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The race to save coffee – The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/classic-apps/the-race-to-save-co…
The race to save
coffee
Look up article on Washington Post website for video
America’s favorite beverage is under attack from climate change
and other woes. Science may offer a solution.
By Caitlin Dewey October 19
Centroamericano, a new variety of coffee plant, hasn’t sparked the buzz of, say, Starbucks’s latest novelty latte. But it may be
the coolest thing in brewing: a tree that can withstand the effects of climate change.
Climate change could spell disaster for coffee, a crop that requires specific temperatures to flourish and that is highly sensitive
to a range of pests. So scientists are racing to develop more tenacious strains of one of the world’s most beloved beverages.
In addition to Centroamericano, seven other new hybrid varieties are gradually trickling onto the market. And this summer,
World Coffee Research — an industry-funded nonprofit group — kicked off field tests of 46 new varieties that it says will
change coffee-growing as the world knows it.
“Coffee is not ready to adapt to climate change without help,” said Doug Welsh, the vice president and roastmaster of Peet’s
Coffee, which has invested in WCR’s research.
Climate scientists say few coffee-growing regions will be spared the effects of climate change. Most of the world’s crop is
cultivated around the equator, with the bulk coming from Brazil, Vietnam, Colombia, Indonesia and Ethiopia.
Rising temperatures are expected to shrink the available growing land in many of these countries, said Christian Bunn, a
postdoctoral fellow at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture who has analyzed the shift in coffee regions. Warmer
air essentially “chases” coffee up to cooler, higher altitudes — which are scarce in Brazil and Zimbabwe, among other coffeegrowing countries.
Temperature is not climate change’s only projected impact in coffee-growing regions. Portions of Central America are
expected to see greater rainfall and shorter dry seasons, which are needed to harvest and dry beans. In Peru, Ecuador and
Colombia, rainfall is projected to decrease, potentially sparking dry periods.
These sorts of changes will pose problems for many crops. But coffee is particularly vulnerable, scientists say, because it has an
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The race to save coffee – The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/classic-apps/the-race-to-save-co…
unusually shallow gene pool. Only two species of coffee, arabica and robusta, are currently grown for human consumption.
And farmers traditionally haven’t selected for diversity when breeding either plant — instead, essentially, they’ve been
marrying generations of coffee with its close cousins.
As a result, there are precious few varieties of arabica that can grow in warmer or wetter conditions. In addition, diseases and
pests that might be exacerbated under climate change could knock out entire fields of plants.
A disease of particular concern — coffee leaf rust, or “la roya” in Spanish — devastated coffee plantations across Central
America in 2011. It effectively halved El Salvador’s coffee output and cost the region an estimated 1.7 million jobs.
Coffee farmers could see their livelihoods threatened, noted Aaron Davis, a British coffee researcher, because coffee trees are
perennials with a 20- to 30-year life span: If a field is damaged by a bad season, farmers aren’t necessarily in a position to
immediately replant it. And because coffee takes three years to mature, farmers face several years without income after new
trees are planted.
“Under all these scenarios, farmers pay the biggest price,” Davis added.
While few experts expect these factors to drive coffee to extinction, they could severely reduce the global supply — and
increase the hardship for coffee farmers.
“The major concern of the industry is that the quantity, and even the future, of good coffee is threatened by climate change,”
said Benoit Bertrand, an agronomist with the French agricultural research group CIRAD and one of the world’s most respected
coffee breeders. “So the question becomes: How can we address this with new technology and new innovations?”
Despite coffee’s global popularity, few growers have risen to the challenge. There has historically been no real market for
improved coffee plants, Bertrand and Davis said: Unlike such major commodity crops as corn or soybeans, coffee is grown
primarily by small farmers with low margins who can’t shell out for the latest seed or growing system.
As a result, coffee is coming late to the intensive breeding programs that have revolutionized other crops. But in the past 10
years, interest around plant improvement has exploded, driven in part by the growth of the specialty coffee market.
Plant breeders have begun cataloguing the hundreds of strains of arabica in existence and cultivating them in different
growing areas. They’ve also begun to experiment with robusta, which grows in higher temperatures and fares better against
diseases but often tastes bitter. There is some hope that new varieties of robusta, or robusta/arabica crosses, could capture
that resilience without the bad flavor.
Lately, there has been a particular surge of interest in a type of plant called an F1 hybrid, which crossbreeds two different
strains of arabica to produce a unique “child” plant. They can be made from any of the hundreds of varieties of arabica and
bred for qualities such as taste, disease resistance and drought tolerance.
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The race to save coffee – The Washington Post
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Because they are the first generation, F1 hybrids also demonstrate something scientists call “hybrid vigor” — they produce
unusually high yields, like a sort of super plant.
Since 2010, eight such F1 hybrids have been released to the commercial market. Bertrand is currently testing a class of an
additional 60 crosses with the support of World Coffee Research.
The researchers say that the top two or three — which are expected to become available to farmers as soon as 2022 — will offer
good taste, high yields and resilience to a range of coffee’s current and future woes, from higher temperatures to nematodes.
“These hybrids deliver a combination of traits that were never before possible in coffee,” said Hanna Neuschwander, the
communications director at World Coffee Research. “It’s the traits that farmers need with the traits that markets demand.
People used to think the two were mutually exclusive.”
But the hybrids’ success remains largely untested at scale. Of the eight F1 hybrids on the market at present, only one —
Centroamericano — has been planted in any significant volume, Neuschwander said. The variety is currently growing on an
estimated 2,500 acres in Central America; for context, the U.S. Agriculture Department reports that Honduras alone grows
coffee on more than 800,000 acres.
Farmers who have planted the new trees are seeing success. Starbucks has sold coffee made from F1 hybrids as part of its
small-lot premium brand. Last spring, a batch of Centroamericano grown on a Nicaraguan family farm scored 90 out of 100
points in that country’s prestigious tasting competition, which some in the industry heralded as a major victory.
But the path to adoption will be steep. Breeders have developed these plants, Neuschwander said, but many areas of the world
don’t have the seed industries and infrastructure in place to actually distribute them. That’s particularly true in the case of F1
hybrids, which — thanks to their particular genetics — can only be grown from tissue samples.
F1 hybrids are also expensive — as much as 2½ times the cost of conventional plants. That puts them well outside the range of
most smallholder farmers, said Kraig Kraft, an agroecologist and technical adviser with Catholic Relief Services’ Latin America
division.
Kraft, who has worked with World Coffee Research to test F1 hybrids in Nicaragua, said that in his region, at least, only
midsize and large plantations have switched to them.
“I think our position is that we need to really understand the requirements for all farmers to be able to use these new
technologies,” Kraft said. “My concern is that small farmers don’t have access to the capital to pay for these investments.”
Even if they did, however, some experts caution that the new coffee varieties are only a piece of a much larger adaptation
process. To cope with the effects of climate change, farmers may need to adopt other agricultural practices, such as shadefarming, cover-cropping and terracing, said Bunn, the researcher.
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In some regions, those practices won’t be economical. And in that case, policymakers should focus on helping farmers
transition to other crops or other livelihoods altogether, researchers stress.
“People sell [F1 hybrids] as a silver bullet,” Bunn said. “To be clear, those plants are indispensable, and I don’t question the
value of the work . . . but we need more to adapt to climate change. And we need to accept the hard reality that some places will
need to move out of coffee production.”
! 11 Comments
Caitlin Dewey is the food policy writer for Wonkblog. Subscribe to her daily newsletter:
tinyletter.com/cdewey. ” Follow @caitlindewey
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