We've been invited to showcase our coffee at the London Coffee festival. Sierra Nevada
is the place where some wonderful coffees come from. How much have you got? That's absolutely
fine to take that. I don't think you should have done that.
Day 2, 7am, flight to Santa Marta. Bring on the coast.
So we went to the north of the country the Sierra Nevada mountains because that part
of Colombia is well known for a prized fair trade organic arabica bean that just had that
really typical north taste of chocolate, hazelnut and sweetness too it. We were in town to visit
a coffee farmer are contacts at Lohas had suggested, they fitted the bill perfectly
but since John had committed us to a container, stakes were now really high. If the coffee
wasn't good enough we would have to go elsewhere. The journey up into this Sierra Nevada mountains
was ridiculous. The journey was just so bumpy and so slow that my fit bit actually thought
I was walking. It was hardcore for 8 hours. So just arrived at the coffee plantation,
it's taken us all day to get here, we are at something like 1600 metres above sea level
and we're shot so enough filming let's hit the sack.
When we woke up in the morning seeing the sunrise over the mountains was one of the
most magical experiences in my life and just absolutely breathtaking. It's 6 o'clock now
and it's a real special day for us. Later we are going out with the pickers, picking
the beans that we're hoping to buy.
I'm gonna f***ing kill you
I'm always shocked and awed at the level of hospitality that you get from people that you know live remotely. Just been
served breakfast so its about like 7.30 in the morning and had this super delicious really
light potato broth.and then we have this fish, what's it called? It's a fresh water fish
from up in the mountains, cooked with a spice that we can't work out but just look at how
tasty this looks, and then interestingly we get served hot chocolate. and they put little
chunks of cheese in there, not bad ey. Think I might do a recipe for this. The farm we
were on was owned by Don Bernardo and his wife Maria. Bernardo turned out to be quite
an incredible character really. 78, 10 kids, 31 grand kids. He turned up there when he
was 16 and started planting arabica coffee bushes. It's just this incredible foresight
of this 16 year old. Think what you were doing when you were 16. Incredible. And so we're
literally going up the side of a mountain and we consider ourselves pretty fit guys
right? Come on. But he is just zooming up the side of the mountain. He was like a gazelle.
We just picked these cherries from 2 different bushes, 2 different varieties, grown right
next to each other so
That's actually quite sweet and lovely. And that's the beans
Once we really got into the plantation and we started interacting and chatting a little bit with
the coffee pickers and I didn't quite understand that essentially their travelling coffee pickers.
The level of skill and the difficulties just incredible. So this is Jorje, I'm John, nice
to meet you. Is Jorje from here and his family? How many kilo's, how many sacks does he pick a day?
170kg. How many bags is that? 17? When you see it you see all the things that are
involved, and all the hard work and sweat that goes into it. It's incredible how manual
the process actually is.
So the coffee cherries that were picked yesterday
from the fields have been brought in, they're coming down into this, which is banging them
together and separating out the cherry from the coffee bean and so do you get these cherries
which have been smashed apart, and then you get these which are the coffee beans, they
get washed and then they get put into the fermentation tank which makes a big difference
to what they taste like. Coffee cherry has been a waste product for years, but now, it's
been turned into a coffee flour. So what Bernardo is doing here is fermenting the coffee, it
needs to be fermented to stop it releasing the body, the flavour, and the taste. Minimum
of 24 hours and then it goes into this troth to be washed. Then what happens is the premium
quality beans they sink to the bottom because they're the highest in density. The second
quality stuff, it rises to the top and that's what this looks like now what they do with
this is they take it back and wash it again, where as the premium quality stuff gets taken
over here to be dried out. So stage one of the drying process is to get rid of all the
water and then it ends up here on the roof. Now this is the stuff that didn't make the
grade and as you can see its got cherries that are not great, they have to go through
it by hand and then that's what ends up in your instant coffee. Good luck with that.
Maria has very kindly allowed me to use her kitchen and me and Colin wanted to say thank
you for welcoming us into their home and so I want to make them muffins with ingredients
that come from these hills. Let's start with getting the wet ingredients together. One
egg, crack it open and beat it. Add 250ml of full fat milk to a bowl.Add the egg in,
a teaspoon of vanilla essence. Half a teaspoon of salt. 60ml of oil and then just whisk all
those ingredients together. So that's the wet ingredients done now we gotta get the
dry ones done. 100ml of coffee flour into your bowl through a sieve. And then you want
100ml of regular flour. Then you want 50g of cacao powder. 175g of golden caster sugar,
half a teaspoon of baking powder and half a teaspoon of baking soda. Now simply add
in the wet ingredients and gradually bring it together. Then take your parchment paper,
what your looking for, you kind of want a nice square and then you wanna kind of just
get them in but twist, see how it kind of twists, just get it all down so it fits in.
What's gonna help is if we just take a bit of the mixture, drop that in the bottom and
that's gonna help them stick down. So i'm just gonna trim them. And now get the rest
of the mixture into the tin, snap a piece of good quality chocolate and push it into
the bottom. Once you've done all of those, grab some cacao nibs and sprinkle those on
top. Then it's ready to go into the oven. Okay so the muffins need to go into a hot
oven, 175 to 20-25 minutes. Now I have no idea if this is the right temperature but
lets give it a go.
Okay lets see how they're getting on.
They're slightly burnt on the top because the oven was a bit hot but.
So this Maria who's been cooking for us for the last 3 days, you ready?
You want to smell?
What you saying? Yeh, it's alright.
Get on, mouth open.
It was quite emotional leaving
the farm, we'd really fallen in love with the people there. We got a sample of Bernardo's
beans but we still have to taste it, what if it didn't measure up? We were in Colombia
to get the best tasting coffee available and since John committed us to a container I was
still feeling really uneasy. However before we had the chance to decide we had the offer
of a lifetime. Okay its 4am in the morning and we're off too see the Arhuaco tribe which
is an indigenous people of Colombia, that are involved in the cultivation of cacao and
coffee so we're all completely beat but should be a good day.
It's about 4:30 in the morning,
this feels like a drug stop but its just a store on the side of the road, we're having
a tinto which is a really traditional way to have a cup of coffee in the morning in
Colombia. What it is essentially is an americano, its got some coffee, they water it down, they
serve it out of these kind of jugs that are you know at the truck stops. Often they'll
have you know cinnamon or sugar and its not too bad. So 7 hours, 2 military checkpoints
we finally arrive on sort of like this plato at the top of the mountain and there had been
a lot of cloudiness, a lot of uncertainty around what exactly we were gonna experience
and what we were allowed to do and not allowed to do. We just kind of looked at each other
and were like okay what now? And then everything changed, it was breathtaking. We turned round
this corner and 70 people all sat down calmly under this shade of the tree and the whole
tribe was waiting for us. We just have traveled all the way up the Sierra Nevada mountain
to meet this troublemaker who thinks this is really funny. He's never seen a ginger before
No westerns get to come up here and see this and its because they sell coffee,
the coffee is changing their lives because you know its about sustainability, its about
allowing them to use their means to change their life and to sustain their life. And
this is the importance about providence you should know where your food and your drink
comes from. See this one agreed don't you? We knew it was gonna be special but its changed
me just realising whats involved and how beautiful and welcoming the people are and how just
epically beautiful that part of the world is. Meeting the Arhuaco was a once in a lifetime
opportunity but now we had to get back to the business at hand. We had to taste the
coffee from Bernardo and even though we both desperately wanted to support Bernardo and
his family, if his coffee didn't taste good enough we'd have to go to another producer.
And then all of a sudden it was all down to one cup of coffee. It was really really D-day.