Colombia
by Omar Latief / Mar 02, 2023
With over 500,000 farmers spanning across 2.2 million acres, coffee production in Colombia is deeply woven into culture. Unlike other areas that mass-produce, you'll find most of the coffee in Colombia is shade-grown and hand-picked, making it some of the highest quality coffee in the world.
Jesuit missionaries recorded the cultivation of coffee in Colombia as early as 1730. A century later, the first coffee exports were shipped to the U.S., and in the 1920s, the National Federation of Coffee Growers (FNC) formed to unite small farmers and promote Colombian coffee internationally.
After a crisis in the 1990s caused by plummeting coffee prices, the country's 500,000 coffee-growing families are slowly recovering and beginning to produce high-quality beans that earn higher prices on the global market. Fittingly, the coffee-growing region of Colombia was recently declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, paving the way for more of this world-famous coffee for years to come.
