BEHIND THE CUP
There’s a stupid joke among coffee buyers, well, it’s not really a joke, it’s more like a fact--that everyone wants to go to the mountain beyond the next mountain. Because we all imagine that just one more mountain over, that’s where the really, really incredible coffee is hidden.
Have you ever gone shopping with the annoying friend who asks the shopkeeper or the farmer’s market guy, “Don’t you have anything else in the back I might want to see?” Then you get the general idea. That’s what we’re like. Sad but true.
It’s taken us four years to pinpoint that “mountain beyond the next mountain” in Santander. We started in Mesa de los Santos, and worked our way north to the Chicamocha Canyon.
How to describe it? it’s dotted with tiny family farms, all growing coffee amid the pine trees. One of our favorite Bourbon types, Pacas is growing every couple of kilometers. And at the highest coffee growing elevations of the country, the air is crisp and wonderful.
Maybe next year we’ll be back around the Chicamocha Canyon, pestering the locals for directions to the mountain beyond this mountain. But really, sometimes even a coffee buyer has to be satisfied. Because it doesn’t get a lot better than this.
Tasting notes
This cup is a wild yet civilized experience, like realizing the dessert at the fancy restaurant includes ingredients we don’t recognise and flavours we didn’t expect: sage, panna cotta, Bosc pear, and loquat.