Manizales: Part 1 Café, cacao, y coco

It's 4:30 am when the armored car picks me up for my first trip outside
of Bogotá. Today my colleague will take me to coffee country to begin
my education of the interplay between coffee, coca and conflict.

"Drink this," he says handing me a white Styrofoam cup of free coffee
at the airport. "We export 11 million bags of coffee a year, the best
beans are exported raw to Europe, the US and Japan to be processed. We drink the leftovers in country."

I take a sip thinking, "How many cups of coffee will I be expected to
drink today?" The sun is yet to rise, and my guess, is that given the
itinerary, it could be in the double digits. Do they drink decaf here?
Is asking a cafetero for a cup of decaf an insult?

I remember trying to force the idea of decaf coffee in Sarajevo. Sanjin
wondered what planet I came from when I would ask in my evolving Bosnian, "Mogu li dobiti casu kafe descafinato?" The waiter would look at him and then back at me and shrug his shoulders, frown a bit and say, "No, nemamo cafu descafinato."

I was sure, that if I, the consumer, could exhibit consistent demand for this product over six years, it would eventually appear. When I left in 2004, only one cafe served descafinato." My friends would implore,"Drinking coffee without caffeine is like smoking without inhaling or...well what's the point????"

In Pakistan we drank chai, doodh pati, tons of lipton black tea...but
back to today...its Colombian coffee...

I had meetings with the Federation of Coffee Growers, the Coffee Research Institution the extension services, the Exporters, the European buyers, the certifiers and the farmers. I knew the day would end at a coffee tasting where I would sip sweet and bitter coffee and discover if I could taste or even smell the difference between a cheap or an expensive coffee. I had my doubts.

Would they let me add milk and sugar???? ...

(Part 1. To be continued. The goal is to write a little bit, as often as I can...do check out the pictures on FB).

Om...