Learning to Drink
What You Grow

The cafe is on a corner in El Poblado, up a narrow set of stairs, in a room with exposed concrete walls and two brew bars and a chalkboard listing origins that would not look out of place in Tokyo or Melbourne or Copenhagen. The barista is twenty-six. She grew up forty minutes from here, in a house where coffee was made in a colador — a cloth sock strainer — every morning, strong and sweet, and drunk without much thought about where it came from or what it could taste like if handled differently. She thought about it eventually. She is still thinking about it now, behind the brew bar, pouring water in slow circles over a bed of grounds from a farm in Huila she visited last month.

This is not a story about a young woman discovering specialty coffee. It is a story about a country discovering itself through a crop it has grown for two centuries without ever fully claiming.

Colombia has been one of the world's great coffee producers since the early twentieth century. The image was everywhere: the fictional farmer Juan Valdez, the burlap sack, the mountain mule, the slogan that promised 100 percent Colombian. The brand traveled the world and became one of the most recognized in the history of food marketing. The coffee inside the brand traveled with it, mostly, to the United States and Europe, where it arrived as commodity, as blend filler, as the reliable middle ground of a category that, for most of the twentieth century, rewarded consistency over distinction. Colombia grew excellent coffee. It sold it cheaply, in volume, to people who would mix it with other things and put it in a can.

What stayed behind was what the export market did not want. The broken beans, the lower grades, the overroasted robusta blended into something drinkable but undistinguished. For generations, the best coffee Colombia produced was the coffee Colombians themselves never tasted. This was accepted as the logic of the market and, like most things accepted as the logic of the market, it went largely unquestioned until someone decided to question it.

The questioning began, as it often does, with a small group of people who had been somewhere else. Colombian baristas who had competed in international championships and stood at brew bars in London and Seoul and seen what attentive hands and traceable beans and a different kind of conversation with the consumer could produce. Roasters who had spent time in Scandinavian specialty houses and come home with the conviction that their own country's coffee, treated differently, could be among the finest in the world. Farmers in Nariño and Huila and Antioquia who had been producing exceptional lots for years, selling them to exporters who paid the standard price and collected the margin elsewhere, and who began to understand that the standard price was not the only price available.

None of them coordinated. None of them wrote a manifesto. They simply began, in different cities and different farms and different roasteries, to act as if the coffee deserved better — and as if the people drinking it in Colombia deserved better too.

Medellín is where much of this is most visible, partly because the city itself has spent the last two decades engaged in a parallel act of self-reinvention so thoroughgoing that it has become a reference point for urban transformation worldwide. A city that was, within living memory, defined internationally by violence and the industry that produced it has become, with enormous effort and considerable complexity and a civic pride that is not naive about its own history, a place associated with design, with innovation, with a particular quality of energetic optimism that is suspicious of sentimentality and interested in what actually works.

The specialty coffee scene fits this character precisely. It is not nostalgic. It does not look to tradition for its authority because the tradition it inherited was not serving it well. It is practical and curious and slightly impatient, and it has produced, in the last ten years, a concentration of cafes and roasteries and barista competitors and origin-focused importers that has made the city a destination for coffee people in a way that would have seemed improbable a generation ago.

There is a particular kind of confidence that comes from deciding to value what you have always had. Colombia is still learning what that confidence feels like. The learning is visible in every cup.

What makes the Colombian moment different from the specialty movements that preceded it in other countries is the proximity. In Japan, specialty coffee is a form of deep engagement with something imported, something that arrived from very far away and was honored accordingly. In Colombia, the barista and the farmer are sometimes from the same department, sometimes from the same town, occasionally from the same family. The distance that the rest of the world's coffee culture has had to work to close — between the cup and its origin, between the drinker and the grower — is, in Colombia, short enough to drive in an afternoon.

On weekends, some of the cafes in Medellín organize trips to the farms in the surrounding countryside. These are not tourist excursions, or not only that. They are an attempt to make the connection physical, to put the person who drinks the coffee in the same place as the person who grows it, to let both of them register the other's existence in a way that a label on a bag, however detailed, cannot quite accomplish.

A farmer in Antioquia who has been growing coffee his whole life and has never had occasion to think of himself as someone interesting to visit is now receiving groups of young urban Colombians who want to understand what he does and why the coffee from his particular hillside tastes different from the coffee grown three kilometers away. He shows them. They ask questions he has not been asked before. He answers from knowledge so deep and habitual that the answers surprise him slightly — not the facts, which he has always known, but the realization that the facts are worth saying aloud to someone who does not already know them.

This is a small thing. It is also not a small thing. A culture learning to value what it produces changes something in the producing of it. Not immediately, not through any simple mechanism of incentive, but in the way that being seen accurately by someone who is paying attention changes the person being seen. The farmer knows his coffee matters. He has always known it in one sense. He is beginning to know it in another.

The tinto — the traditional Colombian street coffee, black and sweet, served in a small plastic cup from a thermos carried by vendors through offices and markets and bus stations — has not disappeared. It will not disappear. It is cheap and it is everywhere and it is the coffee that most Colombians drink most of the time, and there is nothing wrong with it. It is honest coffee, made without pretension, doing what coffee has always done in any country: providing a small, reliable pleasure at an accessible price, at the speed and in the form that the moment requires.

The specialty cafe and the tinto vendor exist in the same cities, serving the same fundamental need, and the distance between them is less about quality than about what the person drinking has time and inclination to bring to the act. This is true everywhere. The espresso bar in Naples and the slow kissaten in Kyoto serve the same function through entirely opposite methods. What Colombia is working out, in real time, is how to hold both ends of its own range with equal pride — to export exceptional coffee and to drink it well at home, to honor the craft without condescending to the custom, to build something new without erasing what was already there.

This is harder than it sounds. Most cultures that have tried to upgrade their relationship with their own produce have tended to either romanticize the traditional past or dismiss it entirely in favor of the new. Colombia, at its most clear-eyed, is attempting something more difficult: to keep the tinto and mean it, and to keep the pour-over and mean that too, and to understand the two as different expressions of the same country's relationship with the same plant.

Back in the cafe in El Poblado, the barista finishes her pour. She sets the kettle down. She lifts the dripper from the server and sets it aside. She pours the coffee into a cup — a local ceramic, made by a potter in the same city, part of a quiet ecosystem of craft that the specialty scene has begun to support without quite deciding to. She carries it to the table.

The coffee is from Huila. She visited the farm last month. She knows the name of the farmer, the altitude of the plot, the particular microclimate that produces the flavor she is about to hand to a stranger. She does not recite any of this. She sets the cup down and says, simply, that she thinks they will enjoy it.

She is right.

Outside, Medellín does what it does: loud and warm and in motion, a city that has decided its future will be different from its past without yet knowing exactly what different will look like. The coffee being grown in the mountains around it is some of the finest in the world. The people in those mountains are beginning to be told so, and to believe it, and to act accordingly. The people in the city are beginning to taste it properly, for the first time, in cups made with care by people their own age who grew up in the same country and decided that growing up was not enough — that understanding what you come from is a different and longer project, and that coffee, of all things, turned out to be one of the places where that project lives.

A ritual does not have to be old to be real. It only has to be chosen, deliberately, by people who mean it.

In Colombia, the choosing is happening now. The meaning is catching up.