Julián Calderón is twenty-nine, wears wire-rimmed glasses, and keeps a spreadsheet of fermentation temperatures on his phone that he updates every two hours during harvest. He runs a six-hectare farm outside Pitalito that his father bought in 1987 with money earned cutting sugarcane in Valle del Cauca. On the farm there are three hundred Pink Bourbon trees, planted by Julián in 2019, that his father refers to only as las raras — the strange ones.
The strange ones produced, in their second commercial harvest, a lot that sold at auction in Seoul for forty-one dollars a pound.
“He is proud,” Julián says, carefully. “And he does not understand why.”
This generational inflection is happening everywhere in Huila. The department, which sits in the upper Magdalena valley between two branches of the Andes, has been Colombia’s largest coffee-producing region for more than a decade. But the coffee being produced there now is not the coffee that made it famous. It is sharper, more expressive, more variable, and in many cases almost unrecognizable as Colombian — which is, depending on whom you ask, either a triumph or a betrayal.
The logic of altitude
The old Colombian coffee identity — nutty, balanced, chocolatey, reliable — was engineered, in part, by the Federación Nacional de Cafeteros in the mid-20th century. It favored the Caturra and Castillo varietals, both high-yielding and disease-resistant, and a uniform washed process. The result was a product of extraordinary consistency that sold, for decades, at a commodity premium.
What the young generation discovered, and what the specialty market has been willing to pay for, is that Huila is not one place. It is a stack of microclimates, a thousand meters tall. A farm at seventeen hundred meters behaves nothing like a farm at twenty-one hundred meters, and a north-facing slope at either altitude behaves nothing like a south-facing one. Fog arrives at different hours on different sides of the valley. The cherries ripen on schedules that no federation bulletin has ever accounted for.
“We started treating the farm as a map,” Julián says. “Not as a field.”
The long fermentation
The other thing that changed, more quickly than anyone in Bogotá expected, was the processing. The traditional washed method — depulp, ferment underwater for twenty-four hours, wash, dry — produces clean, bright, legible coffee. It does not, however, produce the kind of extraordinary aromatics that have come to define the Huila style since roughly 2018.
For those, the farms here have borrowed, adapted, and in some cases invented a family of techniques loosely grouped under the term anaerobic: sealed-tank fermentations, sometimes lasting ninety-six hours or more, in which cherry or depulped bean ferments in the absence of oxygen. The process concentrates esters. It draws fruit notes into the cup that were not there in the cherry. Done badly, it produces coffee that tastes like vinegar and dish soap. Done well — and Huila, increasingly, does it well — it produces lots that taste like raspberry jam and rose water and have nothing obviously coffee-like about them at all.
Julián keeps a small notebook in the fermentation shed. It contains pH readings, temperature curves, and the occasional sketch. On one page, in neat Spanish, he has written: the bean does not ferment. The mucilage ferments. Remember this.
What the father sees
After the harvest, Julián’s father, Don Ernesto, walks the lower part of the farm in the late afternoon, carrying a machete he does not use. He is sixty-seven. He worked these trees with his hands for thirty years. He has, in the past three years, watched his son replace one row of Caturra with something called Pink Bourbon, which was practically unknown in Colombia a decade ago.
He stops at a tree and pulls a cherry off with his thumb. It is deep magenta, not quite red. He turns it in the light.
“This one,” he says. “It ripens slower than the others. Two weeks, maybe. You have to wait for it.”
He puts it back on the tree and continues down the row. Julián, watching from the shed, says nothing. Then, quietly: “He reads the trees better than any of us. He just doesn’t trust the notebook.”
A map that is still being drawn
The export office in Pitalito, on a Tuesday in June, is full of young men and women in hiking clothes who have come down from the hills with sample bags. They open the bags on a long steel table. They cup the samples. They write numbers on small pieces of paper. The numbers become lot prices, and the lot prices become, for some of them, university tuition and roof repairs and, in Julián’s case, three hundred more Pink Bourbon trees planted last February at nineteen hundred meters on a slope that faces, deliberately, southeast.
“The old map is done,” Julián says, walking me back to my car at the end of the day. “We are drawing a new one. It is taking a while.”
He waves at his father, who is sitting on the porch of the house, holding a small cup of coffee that his son made for him from the farm’s own microlot. The old man raises the cup. It is, as far as I can tell, a gesture of approval. Or a toast. Or perhaps just an acknowledgment that the coffee is, against his instincts, extremely good.