bocatos

Coffee was first planted in what is now Colombia by Jesuit priests in the 18th century, and by the late 1800s it had become the country's defining export. Colombia today produces more washed arabica than any country except Brazil and Vietnam, and ranks third in the world by total coffee output. Yet for most of the 20th century, the best Colombian beans left the country, and Bogotanos drank tinto, a thin, dark brew sold from street thermoses for a few hundred pesos. The internal market for high-grade Colombian coffee did not really exist, and most domestic consumption ran on lower-grade beans rejected by export buyers.

That began to change in 1997, when Andres Salazar Caballero founded Amor Perfecto, the first Colombian roastery focused on serving specialty coffee to Colombians. The shop in Quinta Camacho became the slow center of a movement that took fifteen years to gather speed. Cafe Cultor opened in 2014 in Chapinero, building a model around direct trade with named producers in Huila, Tolima, and Cauca, and grew into one of the country's reference specialty operators. Azahar Coffee Company arrived the following year and has since become one of the country's largest specialty exporters, with green coffee shipping to roasters across Europe, North America, and East Asia. Catacion Publica runs a more education-focused operation, training baristas and Q-graders out of its lab.

Devotion Coffee Roasters and a long list of smaller operators round out the contemporary scene. Most Bogota specialty shops source from the Eje Cafetero, the coffee axis of Quindio, Caldas, and Risaralda, but increasingly also from Narino, Cauca, and the high farms of Huila. The city sits at 2640 meters, which means most of the green coffee Bogotanos drink was grown at lower elevations than the city itself. The altitude affects extraction and brewing, and many baristas have developed adjusted recipes for the thinner air.

The broader culture sits in transition. Tinto remains the default in offices, taxi ranks, and bus stations, served sweet and hot from a small plastic cup. Specialty cafes have become weekend destinations for younger Bogotanos and a daily habit for the creative class in Chapinero and Usaquen. Cafe is a meeting word: people meet for cafe in the same way New Yorkers meet for drinks. The result is a coffee scene that finally drinks what the country has long exported, served at altitude, in a city that gets the harvest news before anyone else. The transformation from export economy to internal consumer market is one of the more notable specialty stories of the past two decades.