WATTS WORKS - COLOMBIA 2004 - TRES SANTOS

A Colombian crop technician talking about a seedling coffee tree.

Colombia is the Honda of the coffee industry.  Over the last two decades the coffees of Colombia have developed a reputation among both consumers and roasters for being consistent performers - bright, clean, and durable with a range of chocolate and floral flavor notes that seem to blend well with just about everything.  In 1981 the world was introduced to Juan Valdez and his mule, and by the mid-eighties most coffee drinkers in the US had begun to associate Colombia with quality coffee.  The FNC (Federacion National de Café), a monolithic organization that operates and regulates the coffee industry in the country, succeeded in creating an effective brand identity for its 100% Colombian coffee campaign, and developed an infrastructure that allowed for a degree of consistency and ease-of-use that appealed to roasters of all shapes and sizes. As a result, Colombia became a standard by which other Latin coffees were measured, both with regard to price and quality.  By the time Intelligentsia opened, Colombian coffee was firmly rooted as perhaps the most recognizable coffee origin in the world, and was one of our top-selling coffees from day one.
Things have changed a bit since then.  Our involvement at origin, working directly with growers and cooperative organizations, has given us an entirely new perspective on the supply chain and the role that a grower, cooperative, miller, and exporter play in the production scheme.  Specifically, we’ve come to learn where to focus energy in the effort to preserve and promote quality in all of its forms, and this has led to a new approach to buying coffee.  Bigger does not usually equate to better - in fact, the best coffees I taste each year are typically from very small producers and even specific sections within their farms.  The challenge thus becomes to find and combine the most outstanding small batches of coffee to make one large batch that does not sacrifice quality in process.  

Geoff Watts and one of the cuppers from the team.

Most of the work we’ve done to this point in time has been in Central America, and as a result our usage of other origins that we haven’t traveled to has decreased over the last five years relative to those with which we’ve been directly involved.  This is as it should be.  The coffees we buy as a result of direct partnership with producers are our best coffees, both in the cup and in realm of sustainability.  Those are the coffees where we can actually affect quality at the source, and where we can best ensure that the growers are being rewarded for their exceptional efforts.  In some ways, we traded in our old Accord for a custom-built Bentley, and Colombian coffee became relegated to a support player rather than the main attraction.
Beginning this week that will no longer be the case.  A couple trips to Colombia last year convinced me that there was a lot more under the hood than I had realized.  Anyone familiar with Honda knows that while the Civics and Accords bring in all the dollars, the company itself builds fantastic race cars as well as high end luxury performers under its Acura brand.  And street racers have long coveted those Civics for their adaptability, taking a standard issue and turning it into a glorious rubber-burning monster.  Getting a first-hand look at the production in a few regions in Colombia convinced me that we needed to open up that hood.
In February we spent a week visiting farms in Cauca and Huila, two large growing areas in southern Colombia.  The trip was a godsend.  We went there in an advisory role to look at an agricultural development project being operated by ACDI/VOCA (an international development nonprofit providing technical assistance in agriculture, association and cooperative development, and a host of other things), and our eyes were opened to a potential that we never knew existed.  The shadow of the Federation looms large, touching almost everything that happens in the coffee industry there.  In many ways this has been a great benefit to the growers.  They’ve received stable incomes in relatively tumultuous times, and have received technical support and financial assistance from the FED that small farmers in other countries have no access to.  And the FED itself, with Juan Valdez, has acted as a marketer on behalf of the whole country.  But the rub is this - as a small producer it is very difficult to stand out in such an environment.  There is a measure of homogeneity that is actively encouraged by the way in which coffees are bought, blended, and sold.  The ‘coffee as a commodity’ mindset is somewhat entrenched, and as countries like Guatemala and Costa Rica have emerged in the last two decades as top-end specialty producers Colombia has maintained a low profile within the Specialty community relative to their overall volume of export.  As a result of this approach, many specialty roasters have relegated Colombian coffee to the sidelines in their promotional efforts, and there is a perception that while there is a lot of very good Colombian coffee, the top ones do not compare well with the best of Guatemala, El Salvador, and other great Latin producers.  

A Colombian farmer with his fermentation tanks and depulper.

A small solar drying patio. This is an example of technical assistance of the ACDI/VOCA.

Geoff Watts with a Colombian cupper evaluating coffees from the Cauca region.

A Juan Valdez café in Colombia.

All of these perceptions are rooted in a certain reality.  As a roaster buying coffee from US importers, it is much easier to find an exceptional quality coffee from Guatemala than it is from Colombia.  This reality is very circumstantial, though, and in my opinion has more do to with processing and infrastructure than climate and topography.  Guatemala has identified itself as a Specialty producer first and foremost, and systems for processing and selling are designed to cater to that market.  Things are far from perfect (real, real far) but it is relatively easy to get a coffee from specific farms in any region of the country, and to interface with the growers themselves.  In Colombia it is not so easy, and this separation between grower and roaster causes everyone to steer for the middle rather than driving off-road in search of the truly outstanding.  Sure, there are other factors.  Colombian farmers were encouraged to plant newer hybrid varietals (variedad Colombia) to replace the typica trees in an effort to boost production.  This worked - but many argue that quality suffered in the process.  It’s another example of the commodity mindset informing critical decisions, for better or for worse.  The fact is, boosting production per hectare was probably a very beneficial thing and a smart decision back when world supply was more limited than it is now.  But it was short-sighted in the sense that it presumed the market would always be there to support these consistently average coffees.  In today’s depressed market, those coffees just don’t fetch enough dollar to go around.  The growers that are doing the best in this climate are the ones who have looked towards great quality as a means to differentiate their coffees from everyone else’s, and truly outstanding coffee can still be sold at good premiums.  
In any case, it is true that Colombian coffee does not get the same premiums as their Central American competitors and generally are not regarded as exceptional anymore by the Specialty roasting community.  I shared that sentiment up until last February, and am absolutely grateful that my eyes were opened to the hidden potential of Colombian beans.  Over the course of a week we visited several cooperatives and cupped dozens of small lot coffees from specific growers and groups of growers.  We tasted coffees that expressed themselves unlike anything we had tasted from there before.  The light went on, and in the lucidity that resulted it became clear that while we really like the Colombia we had been using, the country certainly had more to offer.  
I returned in July of the same year to begin cupping and hunting for the coffees that we now knew existed.  There had been a lot of work done in preparation for this visit, and over the course of the last two months our partners in Bogota had been working hard to accumulate coffees from specific groups and individuals that we could sift through on the cupping table.  This is difficult, as it means purchasing coffee far in advance of any sale.  But to have the coffee secure and traceable necessitates this strategy.  Before we even arrived the samples had been picked through and pre-screened, so the hundred-or-so that we tasted were the cream of a larger crop.  

Tim Castle (seated) and George Howell (standing) at the cupping table.

The crew we had for the evaluations was top-shelf.  George Howell (founder of Coffee Connection and Terroir coffee), Tim Castle (coffee trader and author), myself and some excellent Colombian cuppers dove into the samples and over the course of three days tasted each one of the hundred coffees.  On the fourth day, we re-roasted and cupped the top-scoring lots from round one and identified the very best coffees of the group.  It was a tremendous pleasure all around, and the process itself was immensely valuable.  This is how you understand the coffee of a country or a region - there is no other way.  One thing we’ve all learned as cuppers is you’ve got to be prepared to throw the proverbial book out the window if it becomes out-dated or insufficient.  The Cup of Excellence competition has consistently yielded surprises in countries like Brasil and Nicaragua, revealing flavor profiles that had not historically been expected from the country or indicating the vast potential of producing regions that had never been considered great for specialty coffee.  And even within regions that have a long history of producing specialty there is still a lot to learn about what magical combinations of climate, soil, and genetics, and human input produce the kind of coffees that make men weep.  The fact is our industry is still really in the infant stage of development.  There has been a lot of research in coffee, but little of it has focused on evaluating that rarest of specimens - the 95 point coffee that seems almost impossibly crafted, with nuance that is both delicate and still undeniably profound.  How did it happen?  How to reproduce it?  What makes it so incredibly compelling?  These are the million-dollar questions.

A map of Cauca and Popayan just to the East. Cauca is the region Tres Santos hails from.

In any case, the point is that it makes no sense to sit here in Chicago and taste 25 or 30 Colombian coffees each year and think that I understand the flavor profile of the origin.  That is like going out to Kingston Mines a few times a year and claiming to be an expert on the Blues.  Understanding comes when you relinquish the delusion of expertise and realize that no matter how much is known there is much, much more that remains unknown.  As cuppers we train ourselves to recognize and identify tastes, and eventually to connect particular tastes with physical occurrences. Overt tastes like bright acidity, sweetness, saltiness, sourness, bitterness and the like are easy to recognize and can often be tied to specific root causes.  But there is so much more between the lines, and it is in that indefinite space that the soul of a great coffee resides.  I am fond of analogies (perhaps a little too fond, but we all have our weaknesses) and to me this concept is best demonstrated by great reggae music from the seventies.  To the uninitiated or the casual listener it can sound simplistic and repetitive with its trademark down-beats and guitar licks.  But it is dynamic, and the real intrigue lies in the space between the beats - that silence that is not really silent because it is alive with tension.  The beats pull on one another like a tug-of-war, and the space between them is filled with energy.  A great coffee has the same sort of spatial appeal.  The ‘clean, full, and sweet’ part is a given, and within a sip many flavor nuances float serenely across the palate causing the drinker to sigh with gentle delight.  The difference between good and great lies in the detail.  Ultimately, it is our goal to trace those details backwards from the cup to the farm itself and play a role in helping producers make the change from commodity farmer to celebrated artisan.
This may all sound a bit dramatic.  Cars, reggae music and Juan Valdez rarely get the opportunity to collaborate on the same page, and perhaps they really shouldn’t.  I don’t know the answer, but I know that we’ve come up with a smoking hot new coffee from Colombia, and that you should try it immediately.  We’ve chosen to call this new mark Tres Santos in recognition of the efforts put forth by three of the ACDI/VOCA operatives who are helping growers in Huila and Cauca align themselves with higher-value coffee production and move towards crop diversification so as to become more self-sufficient.  Look for this to become a staple in our every-growing line-up of Intelligentsia World Exclusives.

Tres Santos is available in our Online store. Click Here to view and purchase.