Colombia is a diverse group of coffee origins, with Northern and Southern regions staggered in the crop cycle.

Colombian coffee is highly marketed and widely available in the US. They have been largely successful at equating the name Colombian Coffee with "Good" Coffee. This is half-true. Colombian can be very balanced, with good body, brightness (acidity) and flavor. But much of it is a bit boring, and most of it that you find in Supermarket bins etc. is simply a decent clean cup with almost no aftertaste (if its fresh from the roaster, which is not likely).

So, is there good Colombian coffee? Absolutely yes. It just takes work to find it. Good Colombian is rarely sold simply as Supremo or Excelso, a name that designates the size of the beans, the screen size. Colombian coffee that has more "cup character" can be a farm specific coffee, or pooled from particular regions and will have the regional name identifying it. Sometimes a generic Colombian just happens to cup really nice, but that's rare, and it requires cupping each lot to find the special one.

In the past, Colombians were all sold based on bean size (Excelso, Supremo) unlike other Central American and South American coffees which are graded mostly on altitude. Grading by screen size doesn't make sense because a larger bean does not mean better cup quality. In fact, the presence of diverse bean sizes can (but not necessarily) result in better cup quality. Since we rate everything by the cup quality and all coffees are judged "blind", bean size is largely irrelevant, and doesn't enter into how I chose the following Colombians from the 30 to 40 samples I cup each year.

All that is changing in the specialty coffee end of the market; we have come "light years" ahead in the last 5 years, offering micro-regional selections from small-holder coffee producing groups, and abandoning the senseless size-based grading system. We now have access to many more small, farm-specific lots. Part of the current crop quality is this: we can wait for the good coffee, not just go out and buy Colombia when we need it. That's the whole way we operate anyway; we wait for the peak of the harvest. And if you cup a lot of these micro-regional lots, in particular the Tolima, the South Huilas, the Cauca coffees and Narino, there is always a point where all factors converge, and the cup becomes exemplary.

I have been to Colombia now many times - check out the travelogue section of the Coffee Library to see the photos from those trips.