Happy National Coffee Day to Our US Readers!

September 29th is National Coffee Day in the United States and, since we’re here in Colombia, we figured what better day to talk about coffee.

Supposedly the best of Colombia’s coffee is exported to the US and Europe and this may well be true, but don’t let that kid you into assuming you won’t get a good cuppa here. I’ve enjoyed some of the best coffee of my life here in Colombia, and the best part for me is that even your most basic tinto (black coffee) is delicious and only around $0.30. Almost everywhere you turn you’ll find someone to serve you coffee, but there’s a couple of places that stand out for me.

Number one is Jesus Martín in Salento. It’s here where I enjoyed the best coffee of my life and was ultimately convinced that Colombian coffee was the absolute best. We wrote about that whole experience here.

Number two is Juan Valdez, which is a chain coffee restaurant dotted around Colombia. A little like Starbucks? A little, but only in its ubiquity. Juan Valdez is a homegrown chain that specializes in great coffee at reasonable prices. The quality and value is much better than Starbucks and its competitors – so much so that when Starbucks tried to open up here in Colombia they were almost laughed away. Needless to say, they failed.

But it’s not just sitting down and drinking coffee that I’ve enjoyed here in Colombia. In a Colombian Coffee Tour with See Colombia Travel I got the chance to see how coffee is made: from the bean to the cup. It’s much more complex than I imagined, and the majority of Colombian coffee is picked by hand, which goes a long way to explaining the high quality.

Needless to say, the team adorned the traditional coffee-picking wares and got to work picking coffee for our very own cup. Could do with an App for that, really…

Paul