People drink more than two billion cups of coffee every day, and Colombia is one of the world’s top exporters. Coffee was reportedly introduced to Colombia in the early 19th century by Jesuit missionaries . Today, Colombia's coffee farms stretch from the foothills of the Andes to the Cordilleras.
Thanks to this varied geography, coffee cherries ripen at different times, allowing for all-year-round harvesting. Each year, Colombia produces over 11 million bags of coffee - mostly Arabica beans, known for their soft, sweet taste with notes of chocolate, nuts, and citrus. Coffee here is grown in small farms, high up in the mountains, where the conditions are just right - rich volcanic soil, rain, and plenty of shade.
To see for myself how great coffee is made, I visited a family-owned farm near Pereira, a city in an area known as the "Coffee Axis". What I didn’t expect was just how much work goes into making a single cup. The farm was quiet and peaceful when I arrived.
Green hills stretched in every direction, covered in rows of short trees with small, round fruits with coffee beans inside - the cherries. Guided by a local, my first task was finding a handful of bright red cherries good enough for a tasty cup of coffee. Coffee picking is hard work.
Pickers spend around ten hours a day searching for the ripest cherries, filling up their baskets that can weigh up to 150 kilograms. The more they pick, the more they get paid, but if they grab unripe or overripe cherries, they risk.
