Alex's Coffee Adventure

I’m coming up on the end of my time in Bogotá, so I thought I’d spend a day enjoying the city. My flight to Quindio is on Monday morning, but Friday and Saturday will be mostly spent at my Q retake (Friday I have a practice, then Saturday is the real washed milds triangle!), so I don’t have a ton of time left in this awesome city.

Today, I checked out the Botero Museum, visited a couple of coffee shops (what else!), and walked around my Park 93 neighborhood. I also had an INCREDIBLE lunch at a Cevicheria in the Zona T neighborhood.

I started my day at Colo Coffee in Zona T. You may remember Colo from Day 1, in which I tasted their fantastic honey Gesha at their Chapinero outpost that they share with Bourbon Coffee Roasters. This morning, I was just planning on getting a coffee and a pastry, but I soon noticed that they had the latest issue of Roast Magazine on one of their coffee tables, so a 10-minute stop quickly lengthened considerably.

I had heard about a few articles in this issue of Roast that I really wanted to read, but I don’t have my own subscription and the site is under a paywall. When I saw the magazine, I was super excited. I ended up reading the whole thing cover to cover, because even the advertisements intrigued me!

The most interesting part of the magazine by far was a survey that Fairtrade had just conducted on examining the cost of production for a number of representative coops in South American countries.

Measuring cost of production has come up as a recurring theme in my talks with professionals here in Colombia. Almost no small scale farmer has a sense of what their annualized costs of production actually are, as they frequently make payments whenever they come up. For example, harvesters are paid as soon as the dried parchment is sold, equipment is repaired as soon as the old stuff fails, and fertilizer is purchased as soon as soil content shows signs of degradation. These purchasing patterns make obvious sense from a farm management perspective, but they make any sort of cost of production metric very difficult to track.

I was very interested in the analysis in Roast because it not only examined 6 different cooperatives in different countries, but it also broke down cost segments into short-term, medium-term, and long-term costs. Short term costs mostly include labor and “inputs” like fertilizers and pesticides; medium term costs include transportation, taxes, tools, and equipment; long-term costs include land and capital. (It looks like the article in this issue isn’t online yet, but they published a similar study in 2016 that I found online here.)

I ended up spending a full two hours reading the 114 pages of the magazine, but it was awesome and I loved it. I definitely feel a deeper connection to the industry after the Q, and I am excited to keep up with all of the new research coming out in the field.

Then I had my incredible aforementioned lunch at Central Cevichería. As if the ceviche wasn’t good enough by itself, there was a guy walking around with a tray of shrimp??!!!

The food was great, and as per typical Colombian prices the meal cost about $11 in total. Yum and yum.

After the Ceviche, I headed downtown to La Candelaria to see some sights and get to the Botero Museum, which I’ve been meaning to go to since I got here. But not before one more stop at a coffee shop.

This was the weirdest coffee shop I’ve been to by far. It’s a coffee shop and designer t-shirt store run by three German expats. The bar setup includes a small espresso machine, an array of liquors, and a DJ mixing board which constantly outputs thumping techno music. The espresso was rather poor and their t-shirts were horribly overpriced (1200 pesos, or about $60 each!), yet somehow they’ve been open there since 2000. Bogotá, you never cease to amaze me.

Ok, I finally got to the Botero Museum. Botero is the guy who’s famous for painting fat people, and the museum was pretty amusing.

I walked around La Candelaria a bit more, because it’s such an exciting neighborhood. I got some street food snacks and just enjoyed the vibrant city.

To end the day, I went back uptown to my homey Park 93 neighborhood and enjoyed the nice weather. I found a bookstore and browsed their English section for a bit and found something I was really excited about. I picked up a copy of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, maybe the most famous book ever written in South America. Márquez is known as one of the pioneers of the “magical realism” movement in literature, which is central to Colombia’s identity, and One Hundred Years of Solitude is probably his seminal work in the genre. I’m really excited to read this book over the next few days and understand Colombia better.

Finally, I had some dinner nearby and headed home. I have an early start tomorrow: I’m taking the naturals triangle as practice before the washed milds on Saturday, and the triangle starts at 9am. Oof! Better head to bed, and I’ll report how it went tomorrow!

Have a good one! Also, let me know if you’re reading this and you like it, I feel like I’ve been shouting into the void a bit on here! (I turned off sign-in for commenting, so it should be easy to leave a comment below. Or you can just message me to say keep writing!)

Alex