What You Learn on a Medellin Coffee Tour

Every farm day around Medellin is built on the same sequence, and it is worth arriving knowing what the sequence is. A coffee tree takes three years to fruit, the cherry has to be de-pulped within hours of picking, and the decision that most changes how your cup tastes is made in a fermentation tank you will walk past in ten seconds. Here is each station in the order you meet it, which is also the order a coffee plantation tour Medellin runs in.

The nursery, where a tree starts

A coffee plant is grown from seed in a shaded bed for six to eight months before it goes into the ground, and it will not fruit for another three years. Most farms here start you at the seedbed for that reason: it sets the timescale for everything that follows. On two of these tours you plant one yourself and it is labelled with your name.

Picking, and why it is still done by hand

Coffee on an Antioquia hillside ripens unevenly, so the same branch will carry green, yellow and deep red cherries at once. A picker takes only the red ones and comes back to the same tree several times in a season. You will be given a basket on a belt, shown what ripe looks like, and left to work a row; nobody expects you to fill it.

De-pulping, within hours of picking

The cherry has to come off the bean the same day or the fruit starts to ferment on its own. A hand-cranked or motorised de-pulper squeezes the skin and most of the flesh away and leaves the bean in a sticky layer called mucilage. Several farms hand you the crank; one of them serves the mucilage back to you as a frappé.

Fermentation, and the tank that decides the flavour

The beans sit in a tank for twelve to thirty-six hours while what is left of the fruit breaks down. How long that runs, and whether the mucilage is washed off, left partly on or left entirely on, is the difference between a washed, a honey and a natural coffee. It is the single biggest decision a small farm makes about how its coffee will taste.

Drying, on tables in the sun

The beans are spread on raised beds or a concrete patio and turned by hand for one to three weeks until they hold about eleven per cent moisture. In the rainy months the beds go under plastic. This is the step that most often surprises visitors: it is slow, it is entirely weather-dependent, and it is why every farm here watches the forecast.

The trilla, taking the husk off

Dried beans keep a papery parchment layer that is milled away before roasting. On a small farm that is a threshing machine in a shed; commercially it is a mill in the city. What comes out is green coffee, and it is the form in which almost all of Colombia’s crop leaves the country.

Roasting, where the flavour is finished

Green coffee has no aroma to speak of. Eight to fourteen minutes in a drum takes it through the first crack and into the range you recognise. The farm tours roast a small batch over a fire or in a table-top drum; the roastery product puts you in front of a commercial machine and someone who does it for a living.

Cupping, and how professionals actually taste

Ground coffee, hot water poured straight onto it, a crust broken with a spoon after four minutes, then slurped hard from the spoon so it sprays across the palate. It is not elegant and it is the standard method everywhere in the trade. Two of these tours run a proper cupping table; the rest pour you a good cup and talk you through it.

What the farms send you home with

A poncho on four of these days and a hat on two, a picker’s certificate on three, a small bag of the farm’s own coffee on one, and on almost all of them the chance to buy more at the gate for less than a specialty bag costs in El Poblado.

Which tours go furthest on the process

The farms page says which finca each of those runs at, and what to expect covers the practical shape of the day around them. Medellin Coffee Tours compares every option in one table.