Salento Day 2

Coffee day! So excited! We got up earlier than our aching bodies would have liked to get breakfast, pack and make our way to the first tour for 9:00. After checking out and leaving the bags, we walked to the plaza to catch a willy so we didn't have to rush the walk down to the coffee farms. Unfortunately, the willys left on the hour for the farms opposed to the half hour for Cocora Valley.
After the 5km power walk, we got to Finca El Ocaso just as the tour was starting. We didn't really miss anything!
Finca El Ocaso was a medium sized farm that's been in the business for a while. Our tour guide noted at one point, that the third generation was now managing it. We did the brewing tour which was just over three hours. He first talked us through the different kind of plants, arabica and robusta, and then about which countries are major producers, roasters, and exporters. Colombia is the third largest coffee producer in the world! He then told us all about the process of how a coffee plant matures to give us the coffee bean. We learned about their use of soft river soil to help grow the bean, all the way to some ways that a coffee plant can be harmed by fungus or beasties (bad coffee cherries/beans float in water and good ones sink). We were each given a basket and had the opportunity to roam around the neat rows of coffee bushes to try and find some red beans (it's not coffee season so most were green). We then squished a coffee cherry to reveal two slimy coffee beans. They were sweet when you sucked on them! After planting them, we moved on to the fermentation and washing process, the methods for drying, and getting ready to export. The greenhouse for drying smelled amazing 🤩. This farm does some of their own roasting as well as exporting. Next came time to brew and taste. Over the course of this session we brewed using a chemix, v60, and aeropress and made black honey, passion 300, and their natural coffee. We had scales, talked ratios of coffee to water and used fancy scales. The chemix was my preferred method and I enjoyed the passion 300 most followed by black honey and then natural. We also got to try our hand at making an espresso. It was super lemony compared to the brewed coffees. It was fun trying the different methods, but I wish we got to drink the cup of coffee and not just slurp the spoons! After some lunch, plantain lasagna, we headed across the street to a second tour.
The Finca Luger was different from Ocaso. For starters, much smaller. We were given a small cup of coffee prior to the tour starting. The coffee bushes were not in neat rows but stacked and spattered around on a dusty hill making it tricky to find and pick red beans when we had the opportunity to pick and there was lots of random fruit trees and bamboo scattered around too. He talked us through a lot of the same information for growing and the process for plant to cup. The main difference with this tour is when we went into the greenhouse to see the coffee drying, we got to choose some beans to roast ourselves to make the coffee to try at the end of the tour. We chose the red honey (cherries sat in water for 20 days and then shelled and dried). After deshelling the beans we chose, if went into a simple metal pot and we waited for it to roast, stirring constantly to stop it burning. They also brought us a snack of patacone and arepas with sauce. The beans roasted much quicker than I thought they would and they popped like popcorn (in sound only). We ground them up, nothing fancy, and it smelled amazing. Our guide used a simple cloth filter over the jug and offered a chocolate covered bean to eat with the coffee. It was a sweeter coffee and paired nicely with the chocolate.
I really loved how each tour was different and offered something else. The experiences were valuable and informative, but also fun and delicious. It's definitely one of my favorite days so far ☕.
We head back to Medellin to finish off our time in Colombia and move on to Ecuador.Læs mere